Mar
31
2010
0

Mailing lists – down

Update 2: Lists are now working again.

Update: DirectNIC writes “We are currently doing an upgrade on h-sphere, that is why you are getting that error. It should be completed in a few hours. Sorry for any inconvenience.”

Our mailing lists have stopped working.  I’ve written to DirectNIC, the company which hosts them, with this support request:

“I have installed PHPlists on your server several months ago, and they worked fine until this morning.  Now when I go to http://laborlists.org/ and click on LabourStart or IUF, instead of getting a web page to manage my lists, I see the PHP code.  It’s as if your server has stopped recognizing PHP scripts — though I did nothing unusual recently that might cause this.  It’s urgent that we get this fixed.  Thanks.”

I’ll let you know when they are working again.

Written by ericlee in: Mailing list |
Mar
31
2010
0

LabourStart in Numbers [8]

The last month saw a very big gain for our mailing lists and much smaller growth for all the others.  Here are the totals with the changes since the end of February in brackets:

  • Mailing lists – subscribers: 65,379 [+2,243]
  • LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 54,236 [+1,582]
  • UnionBook – members: 4,435 [+25]
  • Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,863 [+54]
  • Twitter – followers: 2,079 [+57]
  • Correspondents: 756 [+9]
  • Union group on Flickr: 533 [+5]
  • LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 158 [+7]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

  • Norwegian 2,589
  • French 1,772
  • Spanish 1,020
  • German 738
  • Italian 452
  • Russian 293
  • Polish 289
  • Swedish 221
  • Portuguese 216
  • Dutch 186
  • Danish 149
Mar
30
2010
0

Our competition massively boosts number of viewers of union videos

Here’s what has happened to the videos nominated in our competition (which ends tomorrow) — this is the growth in the last 3 weeks in the number of views of each video:

  • Just another cog  in the machine: 23,024 – 26,930 (+3,906)
  • Climate change: 1,303 – 4,047 (+2,744)
  • Vale Fuhrer: 10,109 – 13,877 (+3,768)
  • The Janitor: 70 – 2,994 (+2,924)
  • CUPE 3903: 103 – 2,816 (+2,713)
  • What have the unions ever done for us?: 176,593 – 182,428 (+5,835)

As about 2,800 people have voted, it seems like nearly all of them are viewing all the videos.  This is especially clear when looking at the two highlighted videos which had practically no viewers before we launched our competition, and have experienced a 30-40 fold increase in viewership thanks to our effort.

Written by ericlee in: Labour video of the year |
Mar
30
2010
0

Focus on Egypt

I’ve set up a special page on LabourStart with news about Egypt and links to key sources of information, here.  All clicks on the word ‘Egypt’ on our home page now redirect to here.

I’ve also written an article about what I saw and learned last week in Cairo, here.

I’m currently following up with the various contacts made there.

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Mar
29
2010
0

São Paulo

I have been invited to speak about UnionBook and other online tools at the upcoming congress of SIGTUR – the Southern Initiative on Globalisation and Trade Union Rights.  I’ll be in Brazil from 16 April through 22 April.  The conference is being hosted by the CUT, a national trade union center, and we’ll also take the opportunity to meet with them about the relationship between CUT and LabourStart.

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Mar
29
2010
0

Cairo

CTUWS founder Kamal Abbas addressing the meeting.

CTUWS founder Kamal Abbas addressing the meeting.

I just returned from a three-day visit to Cairo as the guest of the Center for Trade Union and Worker Services, an NGO which for 20 years has fought to create independent and democratic trade unions in Egypt.

I’ll be writing up a full report for my blog, but from a strictly LabourStart point of view this was a very important trip. Followup will include:

Recruiting new correspondents in Egypt
Creating a special Egypt news page with links
Reinvigorating our Arabic language page
Arranging for Egyptian trade unionists to attend our conference in July
Doing joint campaigns with the CTUWS

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Mar
15
2010
0

Eric Lee – absence

I will be travelling from early morning on Monday, 15 March through Saturday, 27 March, and will have very limited email access during this period.  Please email only in the event of an emergency.  I can always be reached by SMS in case of emergencies: +44 7846658571

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |
Mar
14
2010
0

Another campaign, a new blog … and a problem

At the request of the UE and ICEM, we’ve launched another campaign — the second in two days — here.

This campaign is featured, together with other campaigns, on my new personal (not official LabourStart) blog on the website of Amnesty International’s UK Section.

The problem? There’s some evidence mounting that there may be some attempts to block our campaigns again, black-listing us as spammers:

  • Everyone who signed up to the LabourStart campaign in support of the Iraqi teachers received a threatening email from one of the targets, who claimed he’d go to the police.  I wrote to him, as did the TUC, telling him to fuck off.
  • Our ISP (1&1 Internet) sent us a form letter warning us that there have been reports that we’ve been spamming.  I replied asking for additional details but have heard nothing.
  • An email I just sent to a target in our new Mexican campaign bounced back saying that the address sending it was associated with spam.  Not sure if this is our ISP or Gmail or labourstart.org.
  • One of our readers has spotted a possible attempt to block our laborlists.org address as being a source of spam — I’m investigating this now.  This is not connected to our ISP, and is worrying. UPDATE: I’m less worried about this now; it’s being caused by ZoneAlarm which may be flagging up laborlists.org because it’s a new domain name, and because our domain name registrar is based in the Cayman Islands (which should set alarm bells ringing).

All this couldn’t come at a worse time, as I’m travelling for the next two weeks.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns,Mailing list |
Mar
12
2010
0

New campaign launched – Guyana

It’s taken a long time but we’ve finally got the green light and texts from the ICEM to launch this campaign — our first-ever in support of workers in Guyana.  It is hoped that this campaign will raise our profile in the whole Caribbean region.  This will mean that we have 5 live campaigns at the same time.

Written by ericlee in: Campaigns |
Mar
11
2010
0

More updates, briefly

Conference 2010: We’ve got a registration page up, not yet for public consumption.  We also have written to Labor Notes about purchasing a full page ad in their own conference program book.  And we’re making a special effort to attract women trade unionists to our conference, and to fund travel for women from developing countries to attend.

Labour Video of the Year: So far, over 1,300 votes cast in less than two days.

TUC campaign in support of Iraqi teachers: We did a mailing to our 5,000 or so UK subscribers. This boosted support for the campaign from 12 (after 2 weeks in which British unions did little or nothing to promote) to 118.

Guyana campaign: We’ve gotten the green light from ICEM to launch this — should be sometime soon.

New campaign for Mexico: UE and the ICEM have green lighted this as well — we’re waiting for some clarifications before launch.

And this too:The support of LabourStart was vital to the Green Isle Foods dispute because the parent company, Northern Foods, was largely insulated from the dispute in Ireland in terms of public relations, even though local management said everything discussed in local discussions had to be referred to Leeds for a decision.  The Irish mainstream media showed little interest in the dispute so that we were heavily reliant on alternatives. The fact that so many British trade unionists and consumers sent emails to Northern Foods brought home to the employer that there were consequences to bad behaviour, such as ignoring the Labour Court.  Many thanks, Padraig Yeates on  behalf of the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union.”

Our 25th language? We have a new correspondent in Spain who speaks Basque …

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