Inside LabourStart

A colleague of ours, Walton Pantland (email: waltonp@gmail.com) who works for the British union UNITE, is doing research into how trade unions and their members are using new technologies for organising and has asked me to ask you to fill in his online survey.  You can also visit his CyberUnions blog here.

I’ve just sent out a special urgent action appeal to our list in English at the request of the IUF in support of this campaign.

Steve Jobs of Apple

This is starting to appear all over the net.

UPDATE: Fortune is now running with this story.  There’s also a version on PCPro, the website of a very important print magazine in the UK.  Versions are appearing in different languages including German, French, Italian and Chinese.

I first read about it on “App Advice” which wrote that “the conversation began with Jay’s forwarding of a LabourStart campaign email, which included the message” — and then goes on to quote our campaign.

They apparently picked up the story from “MacStories” — which actually includes a link to LabourStart in its article, as well a screen shot of our email message about the Foxconn campaign.

I wrote to Jobs myself yesterday, as did Derek Blackadder, and we’ll let you know here if he responds.

LabourStart has once again become a key source of breaking news as we gather trade union responses to the tragedy that took place yesterday.

We were the first website to report the reaction of Israeli unions.  We highlighted the response of the International Trade Union Confederation.  We’ve linked to reactions by the global union federations as they come in — including the IFJ and ITF.  We’ve reported on reactions by national trade union centers such as COSATU and the Canadian postal workers.  I encourage all correspondents to continue looking for union reactions and to post these with the names of both countries — Israel and Palestine.