Inside LabourStart

This month we’re promoting Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting: The Global Working Class.  Please spread the word in your unions.

We’ve gotten the green light to shut down two of our campaigns after more than three months online.

The Algeria campaign with 2,735 messages sent produced no results in the field (we are told).  The union is looking to get a new headquarters somewhere else.

The Foxconn campaign, with 5,484 supporters (yes, double the number of the Algeria campaign), contributed to a lot of publicity about the case and probably helped pressure Foxconn to raise wages.

Later today, we’ll have only 6 active campaigns.

I wonder if we shouldn’t begin to make as one of the criteria for our campaigns that there be some reasonable expectation that the campaign produce a result.  Not a guarantee, of course, but sometimes I think unions ask us to do campaigns because it’s just something on their to-do list to publicize a dispute, but the effort produces no result at all and no one ever expected it to do so.

This sounds harsh, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be thinking about it.