These are unedited, raw comments – sorry, but I won’t have time to edit them or study them thoroughly, but I encourage others to do so if you have the time and inclination.
25
2011
20
2011
20
2011
Sunday evening update: campaigns, Twitter, newswires
We’ve just closed down the campaign in support of jailed teacher trade unionist Rosalba Gaviria Toro, which generated 3,590 messages of protest. Natasha Morgan of Justice for Colombia wrote to say: “Labour Start has really boosted the campaign, and it would be excellent to work with you again in the future.”
We’ve found a better way than Twitfeed to automatically update LabourStart’s tweets. We now use Tweetlive for this purpose. At present we have 3,027 followers, a gain of 25% in the last six months with some 600 new followers.
We now have a newswire for British Columbia; this was requested by someone who designs and manages websites for unions there.
All the email addresses we collected in our first annual survey of global trade union use of the net have now been added to our mailing lists.
Here are our top current campaigns – all of them launched within the last month – in order of popularity:
- 4,617 Bangladesh: Free Moshrefa Mishu (20 Jan)
- 3,346 Mexico: Defend trade union rights (10 Feb)
- 2,554 Turkey: Reform labour laws now (26 Jan)
- 2,385 Philippines: Dole must respect union rights (16 Feb)
- 2,332 Pakistan: Reinstate sacked trade union leader at Syngenta (9 Feb)
- 1,683 Turkey: Polyplex must reinstate sacked workers, negotiate with union (9 Feb)
18
2011
Massive response to new campaigns – huge growth for mailing lists
Over 5,000 messages were sent out in response to our campaign appeals in the last 48 hours – this is a new record for us.
Many of these were new people and as a result, our mailing lists saw significant growth this week.
The net gain to all our lists in the last 17 days was over 1,650 subscribers – with major gains for English (1,275 new subscribers), Spanish (165 new subscribers), and Turkish (150 new subscribers).
16
2011
Three new campaigns launched in one day
This doesn’t happen every day, but we’re feeling the pressure from trade unions around the world and global union federations … so we can’t really say no.
Here are the three campaigns launched today:
10
2011
Thursday morning in brief: campaigns and more campaigns
We are today launching a very big joint GUF campaign in support of trade union rights in Mexico. The campaign is being launched simultaneously in 7 languages.
The ICEM has given us two campaigns to launch today – but we are holding off for a few days on the publicity blitz. The campaigns focus on Pakistan and Turkey.
We are very close to a public announcement of our Hindi language edition.
We’ve been holding some email based discussions about the next Labour Video of the Year competition – work will begin on this in March.
03
2011
Thursday evening update: new campaigns, conference update, Egypt and Hindi
Campaigns: We were asked by KMU in the Philippines to launch a campaign on behalf of Dole workers; after consulting with colleagues in the field, we agreed to do so and are now awaiting the text. Meanwhile, we have informed the International Metalworkers Federation that we wish to close down the India Foxconn campaign after three months and are in the process of doing so — we await final instructions from them. We publicized the IUF’s joint campaign with FLOC regarding the murder of a union organizer in Mexico.
Conference: I’ve drafted a short proposal for the conference, to be held in the fall in Istanbul. I plan to visit to Turkey at the end of this month to meet with the organizing committee which is being formed there.
Egypt: While the Internet was down, our comrades in the CTUWS were able to phone out short messages which were then transcribed and translated in to English – and sent to us. We’ve been publicizing our special Egypt news page throughout the week using our mailing lists, social networks, etc.
Languages: We have now been sent the text for a Hindi edition of LabourStart which we hope to launch soon.
01
2011
LabourStart in Numbers: Numbers rising, but visits to site falling?
Here are the totals with the changes since the end of last month in brackets:
Mailing lists – subscribers: 72,403 [+1,620]
LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 60,240 [+1,322]
Unique visits to the site this month: 540,582 (-11,153)
Page views this month: 1,527,540 (-409,670)
Popular language home pages (last month in brackets):
* English 44,183 (41,748)
* French 5,084 (4,676)
* Norwegian 5,033 (6,768)
* Finnish 2,121 (2,069)
* Russian 1,851 (1,605)
* Polish 2,016 (1.833)
* Dutch 1,523 (1,280)
UnionBook 2.0 – members: 3,094 [+289]
Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 4,150 [+220]
Twitter – followers: 2,912 2,790 [+122]
Correspondents: 844 [+16]
Union group on Flickr: 595 [+2]
LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 276 [+39]
Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:
Norwegian 2,743 [+19]
French 2,385 [+37]
Spanish 1,288 [+21]
German 846 [+6]
Italian 532 [+3]
Turkish 515 [+25]
Russian 495 [+9]
Polish 303 [+1]
Chinese 244 [+1]
Portuguese 242 [+4]
Dutch 236 [+3]
Swedish 225 [-2]
Danish 160 [+1]