Inside LabourStart

This new campaign comes from the Korean Metal Workers via the International Metal Workers Federation.  It is, as we’ve grown to expect from our comrades in Korea, a very exciting one – an aerial protest in a crane lasting for months, police battling workers using liquid tear gas, arrests of activists, and so on.  Please do what you can to promote this – it’s urgent.

93,000 workers went on strike at an Adidas factory in Vietnam two weeks ago; 20 were reportedly arrested.  I’ve asked SACOM (in Hong Kong) who broke the news if we should do a campaign.  If so, it could go very large – Adidas is a household name.  More details soon.

This is progress – albeit slow progress.   (UnionBook has grown from 2,800 to 4,000 in 6 months – an average growth of 200 per month.)

I’ve just sent out a message to all 4,000 members of UnionBook urging them to recruit others – and there’s now a countdown clock on the front page to 4 September when we will decide whether to continue with the project.

If we have 5,000 members signed up by then, we will.  If not, we’ll have to think about this.

• Bahrain – 4,671 (after 79 days) +5
• Georgia – 3,412 (after 7 days) +60
• Iraq – 3,391 (after 37 days) +5
• Botswana – 3,343 (after 31 days) +3
• Colombia – 2,773 (after 17 days) +6
• Swaziland – 2,338 (after 77 days) +2
• Russia – 1,663 (after 28 days) +7

(Updated after 3 days – the numbers in blue indicate how many new supporters each campaign has signed up in the last three days.)

Some thoughts – and I’d love to hear yours …

• The Georgia campaign is doing exceptionally well after only a week.  If we can keep up some momentum, this could become one of our big ones.  This may be due to the big surge in our lists after the very successful online campaign in support of Canadian postal workers.
• The Russia campaign, on the other hand, is getting hardly any response at all.  I wonder why.  Could it be that people don’t want to get involved in what may be a complex case — one that requires us to trust a union’s account of what has happened and to distrust the authorities?  Or is it just too obscure?
• Very disappointed in the Swaziland result, but my guess is that it’s the fact that there’s so little media attention paid (outside of southern Africa), so people don’t know where this is.  Of course the same may be said of Georgia, but many Europeans will at least have a vague sense of where Georgia is.
• The Bahrain campaign is the next one we’ll shut down in another 11 days, and it’s unlikely (unfortunately) that it will be one of the special ones that clears the 5,000 mark.  Too bad.

So, what do others think?