Inside LabourStart

See here – and please promote widely.

After less than 2 months online, at the request of PSI we’re closing down the Botswana campaign. It sent off 3,373 messages. I am waiting to hear from PSI what the results were on the ground, and if we can get a message from the union there.

I’ve scanned this in – sorry, but it’s a very large JPG image: first page, second page.

Yesterday I set up a mailing list for people who have registered to attend the LabourStart conference in November.  The list includes both those who say they can pay their own way, and those who are waiting to hear about subsidies.  Many of the people who ‘registered’ on Facebook to attend the conference have not done so using our online form, so they will not have seen the message.  My plan is to send out an update every week over the next 13 weeks or so until the conference happens.  If you’re reading this, but didn’t get the email newsletter, you’re not registered for the conference.

On May Day, we sent out an appeal to our lists in English and Spanish and were able to raise a considerable amount of money for our project (considerable, that is, by our rather modest standards).  But looking things over, it seems as if our volunteer translators never translated this into other languages.

Some of our lists have gotten quite large lately – the French list has 3,135, the Norwegian 2,367, and the German 799.   (Other large lists seem less likely to generate a response – though we do have 693 on the Turkish list and 514 on the Russian list.)

Perhaps we should do a new, revised text and mail to these lists as well?

In the last four days, in addition to watching our Palestine campaign grow, showing off our new conference poster, and and thinking about Cafe Press (see earlier posts), here are a few of the things that have been on the agenda at LabourStart this week …

1. Have been holding an email conversation with our internet service provider (1&1) about the possible listing of their IP address in the SORBS spam database – some people sending off protest messages to Georgia have received reports that indicate this. Still investigating what’s going on.
2. Attended a meeting at the Trades Union Congress to discuss Egypt and expressed a willingness to do more – including a possible campaign in support of labour law reform in that country.
3. Fixed the newswire which is now featured on LabourStart’s French page on Facebook to open links in a new window (as is the case for the campaigns newswire).
4. Received another nice donation from a Canadian union, processed it and had Derek thank them.
5. Spoke with the International Metalworkers Federation about a possible campaign on Malawi – but after consulting with the ITUC, this has been placed on hold.
6. Provided advice on social networking to UNI, which is campaigning against Deutsche Telekom – a union-buster in the USA.
7. Mailed all members of UnionBook about our conference, the campaigns, and the need to recruit some 900 new members in 40 days.
8. Improved daily campaign stats program to show only the current month; could not get it to show in reverse order.
9. Backed up mailing lists, MySQL databases, and all files on the website.
10. Added campaign supporters to MailChimp lists.
11. Removed spam signups to the conference database.
12. Updated conference website with the Turkish version of the ‘respect’ form.
13. Sorted out tickets for travel to Istanbul in September for a meeting with our conference committee.
14. Sent out the weekly mailing in German.
15. Sent out a mailing to over 600 Francophone Canadians.
16. And answered dozens and dozens of emails.

The Palestine campaign now has 3,605 supporters after only 6 days online.  It is only 32 behind the Georgia campaign, which has been online for  27 days.  One or two points to note – just random observations, really:

• The other campaigns were launched at the initiative of large and powerful national trade union centers and global union federations (IMF, AFL-CIO, ICEM, PSI, etc.).  This one was launched at the initiative of a very small, independent union (WAC Ma’an).  Sometimes, small is beautiful.
• Sometimes, the nationality of the workers involved is decisive. I’ve noted before that campaigns targetting countries like Botswana and Swaziland are unlikely to draw widespread support (at least from outside the region – Southern Africa).  But some countries are always in the news, and people from all over the world therefore feel a genuine, spontaneous sympathy for the workers in that country.  Palestine would fall into this category.
• The addition of Hebrew has done little to expand the campaign – there are only 32 messages that have been sent out in that language.  The Arabic campaign, which has been repeatedly edited and fixed, is not yet drawing any support at all.
• The Canadians are once again in the lead – a result of there being so many of them on the mailing list, which is in turn the result of a very successful campaign that interested their labour movement (the postal workers’ strike and lockout).  They are followed close behind by the UK and USA, and together these three countries account for a clear majority of the messages sent.  (Australia is, unfortunately, now lagging far behind.)

Time for a second look?

We used to sell LabourStart-branded stuff here.

There was some concern that the products were made not only by non-union labour, but under less-than-ideal conditions (e.g., in China).

Does anyone want to take a second look now?

Maybe they offer a more ethical range (i.e., union-made or at least ethically produced products).

Many, many websites use CafePress to raise money, and we might be able to do so as well – but don’t want to be accused of selling sweatshop goods.

The number of people who are fans of LabourStart’s Facebook page in English has leaped from 1,710 to 1,879 in just two days – a growth of 10%.  If this rate continues, sometime in the next day or two we will reach 2,000 fans.  This would mean leaping over five other sites in the ‘league table’ I published here on the weekend, putting LabourStart in 19th place instead of 24th.

Also over the weekend I quietly launched a LabourStart ‘badge’ which people can use on Facebook.  You can learn more here.  It looks like Derek, myself and one other person have successfully done this to our Facebook images. Should we promote this more aggressively?

Finally, the Palestine campaign is doing very well relative to other recent campaigns.  Here are the totals:

1. Georgia 3,617 (25 days online)
2. Iraq 3,411 (55 days online)
3. Botswana 3,363 (49 days online)
4. Palestine 3,138 (only 4 days online)
5. Colombia 2,819 (35 days online)
6. Korea 2,746 (12 days online)
7. Russia 1,697 (46 days online)