Inside LabourStart

Real world trade union solidarity - the picket at GEA.

Ten days ago, a couple of bus-loads of trade union activists from around 30 countries paid a solidarity visit to the picket line of locked-out workers at GEA, a German-owned metal company in Turkey.

We’ve now been asked by the International Metalworkers Federation to turn this into an online campaign, and have done so this morning.

The campaign is here.

We thought the solidarity picket was very exciting and tried to share some of that excitement with comrades who couldn’t be with us in Turkey.

It will be interesting to see if we can keep up the momentum, turning a real-world act of solidarity into an online one.

Please spread the word.

We’ve also today launched a campaign in support of jailed Pakistani trade union leaders – at the request of the ITGLWF.

As we’ve launched three campaigns in less than a week, we’re going to stagger the publicity to our mailing lists — and will start with the IMF Turkey campaign.

I was invited to Gottingen, Germany yesterday to give a talk at a conference with that title.  My talk is here.  It was a great opportunity to begin building bridges with the German trade union movement, as the event was organized by their foundation (the Hans Boeckler Stiftung) and I was on a panel with two German trade unionists, one from the national center (DGB), the other from the ILO.  All this is very important in the run-up to the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference due to be held in May 2014 in Berlin.

We need to do a lot of work to raise LabourStart’s profile in Germany in the next 30 months.  Here is where we stand today:

Mailing list: 1,271 names (up from about 800 a year ago)

Correspondents: we have at least 11 correspondents in Germany – though they are not particularly active.  (We’ve had over 3,000 news stories about Germany posted on LabourStart – but mostly by correspondents from outside the country – see here. )

We should aim to grow these numbers over time.

Here are links to reports about the conference, videos and photos, audio recordings, slide shows and the texts of speeches. (more…)

Check it out here.

You might find this piece of some interest.

Less than 24 hours after launch, both jailed trade unionists are now free.  I’m announcing this to our correspondents first, then to our lists.

Not only do we now have campaigns in Japanese, and regular mailings in Japanese (both thanks to Mac Urata) but we now also, apparently, have a news page on LabourNetJapan.

Not sure what to do with this yet, but wanted to grab it before anyone else did …

At the request of the ITUC we’re closing the current Fiji campaign and launching a new one today.

The previous campaign, launched in late August, was our second largest in 2011 and one of the very largest we’ve ever done, with well over 7,000 messages sent and over 2,000 recommendations on Facebook.

Let’s hope the current campaign, which is being rolled out over a few days, can beat that and lead to the release of the union leaders.

Some highlights:

* Nearly all the mailing lists are growing – some quite dramatically (the German and Spanish lists, for example, over the last couple of months).
* As for social networks, there’s now a virtual tie between the number of users of UnionBook, the members of LabourStart’s Facebook group, and our followers on Twitter. At the moment, the Facebook group is the largest – by 4 people. But it suffered a net loss in members this month, while UnionBook picked up about 100 new ones.  My guess is the UnionBook or Twitter will lead next month.
* We continue to pick up several members each week for our LinkedIn group, which we barely use and never promote. We’re now up to just under 500 members. If any of you are very active users of LinkedIn and are keen to take charge of this, let me know.
* At our current rate of growth, we’ll be at 1,000 LabourStart correspondents by the end of February. At that point – or sooner – we might want to begin to purge the list of inactive ones.
* There was a massive increase in traffic to the site in October – page views alone were up about 30% compared to September. And on a peak day, we’re now getting over 24,000 unique visitors.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets (large gains are in bold face):

Mailing lists (with over 100 members)

English: 65,425 [65,139]
French: 3,291 [3,199]
Norwegian: 2,342 [2,318]
Spanish: 2,051 [2,021]
German: 1,058 [908]
Turkish: 708 [700]
Russian: 609 [597]
Italian: 552 [539]
Polish: 303 [302]
Portuguese: 244 [252]
Chinese: 249 [249]
Dutch: 235 [231]
Swedish: 188 [190]
Japanese: 124
Finnish: 181 [179]
Danish: 115 [117]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,599 [4,498]
Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,703 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 2,855 [2,705]
Like LabourStart page (French): 83 [79]
Twitter –
English – followers: 4,699 [4,541]
French – followers: 80 [78]
Union group on Flickr: 658 [652]
LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 485 [464]

Website

Correspondents: 930 [916]
Unique visits to the site this month : 573,525 [503,250]
Peak day: 24,154 – 18.10.11
Page views this month: 1,402,386 [1,120,845]