Major new campaign launched in defense of Georgian unions
The International Department of the AFL-CIO in Washington has asked for our help with this one. It’s an important campaign and I hope that we can grow it into a very large one.
The International Department of the AFL-CIO in Washington has asked for our help with this one. It’s an important campaign and I hope that we can grow it into a very large one.
The Canadian postal workers campaign is now closed. It received a total of 13,821 messages sent – here’s a breakdown by language:
Here’s what the union had to say to us:
We’re closing down two online campaigns because we’ve won – Atilio Jaimes Pérez is free, 17 days after launch of the LabourStart campaign, and Arwyn Thomas, the sacked union rep on the London Underground, has been reinstated.
It looks as though the NDP, the social democratic party and official opposition, may be fairly effective in delaying the back-to-work legislation. This gives a bit more life to the campaign – it may still be live early next week.
This is an important campaign not just for the union involved, but for LabourStart’s reputation in Canada (very good now I should say) and it has already added several thousand new addresses to our mailing lists.
Please push this in any way you can. Especially with any contacts you might have with transportation/communications/post office unions in Latin America (where this union is well-known).
To date Facebook has proven quite effective. Give it a try if you have an account, try posting links and explanatory text on union pages/groups or even on the walls of individuals with lots of union ‘friends’.
Thanks.
First of all, my goal of 10,000 messages in the Canada Post campaign by the weekend turned out to be not ambitious enough. It’s only Thursday and we already have 11,213 messages sent. Unfortunately, the Colombia Vale campaign launched the same day, has received only one-fifth as many supporters – 2,455. Which raises some questions in my mind about how we go about building the global campaigning capacity of the international trade union movement. I intend to address these in a column I’ll be writing later today for Solidarity, a British weekly.
Conference registrations are not exactly flooding in — but at least today I’ve sorted out some error processing. If you try to sign up without giving your name, or an email address, or a country (e.g., you leave ‘Select a country’ as your choice), you’ll be prompted to fix these. You might think, who would register without giving such basic details, but a significant percentage of those who fill in the form leave out their name, country and email – which are the basic things we need.
Finally, a £500 donation from a union in New Zealand has pushed us very close to the £20,000 mark in this year’s May Day fundraising campaign. This is great news, but we can do better — and I’ll be following up today with 6 unions which last year donated a total of £7,000. While the amount of money coming in is nearly double what we raised last year, and that’s great, this is nothing as compared to what other groups manage to raise. We can do so much better if we try.
This is shaping up to be the biggest campaign we’ve ever run — and we’ve only just scratched the surface.
As I write these words, we’re at 7,463 9,184 messages sent.
But we can easily reach the figure of 10,000 and if we’re any good at this campaigning thing, much more than that.
Keep these numbers in mind:
So let’s be ambitious — the sky’s the limit!
It’s been more than a year since we had a campaign with more than 5,000 supporters – and we have one again now, thanks to the Canada Post and its effort to crush the union. This campaign broke the 5,000 barrier within 72 hours of launch.
We’re closing down the Canada-only campaign and focussing on this. The campaign already has 3,224 supporters – even before we do the global mass mailing!
The Vale Inco campaign we waged in 2010 was one of the largest we ever did. Now we’ve been asked to do another, this time focussing on union busting in Colombia. The ICEM and IMF should be behind this one as well. The campaign is now live, here.
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