Inside LabourStart

New office: The Internet was connected on Thursday, 30 August and I’ve been working here ever since. Still need to move 9 sets of bookshelves and about 1,500 books here, as well as some files and a few small pieces of furniture, which will probably be complete this weekend.

UK events & donations from unions: I’ll be attending the TUC congress in Brighton on Monday and the London Labour Film Festival on Thursday, and will distribute LabourStart flyers at both events. Today, I sent out a message to our 8,000+ subscribers in the UK asking for volunteers to help. I also took the opportunity to congratulate the new TUC general secretary, Frances O’Grady, who opened our 2008 LabourStart conference in London. We’ve gotten recent donations from Unite the Union’s South West region and UCATT (the construction workers union) here in the UK. We’ll be getting a donation from Unison Wales next week following my workshop there.

Conference 2012: I approved a draft document regarding the hiring of someone full time in Australia to help with the conference.

Campaigns:

• Siemens – Should end soon as the vote is today. This is (almost) our largest active campaign at the moment, with 6,772 supporters, after only 12 days online. A special Labo(u)r Day mailing aimed at North Americans helped a bit.
• An “Arab Spring” for the workers?: This may be the theme of these week’s mailing, as we expect to launch a Morocco campaign for the ITF, and to publicize Egypt and Tunisia campaigns for the IUF — all at once.
• Turkish aviation workers campaign: This was closed on Monday — it was one of our largest campaigns.

Correspondents: We have an Arabic language sign up form and it’s nearly complete. Thanks to Erin at the Solidarity Center for help on this, and on recruiting correspondents from the Arab world. On Monday this week I added 10 new correspondents, completely clearing the backlog of such requests.

Hebrew edition: I’ve take a number of steps to improve this, including ensuring that news from outside Israel appears here, getting more correspondents involved, growing the mailing list and the supporters of campaigns, and so on.

Highlights this month –

Though August is traditionally a quiet month, and this is reflected in the lack of growth for the top mailing lists, we had a huge growth in our Turkish list (up by more than 50%, a gain of over 1,000 subscribers) and the German list grew by 202 subscribers, a gain of nearly 10%. In social networks, we’re rapidly approaching 5,000 ‘likes’ for our Facebook page in English, with another nearly 300 in French and Turkish. We’re just under 1,000 members of our LinkedIn group – which we’ve done absolutely nothing to publicize. We’re finally over 1,000 correspondents (and will need to soon starting weeding out the inactive ones). Finally, visits to the website soared for some reason in August, with a gain of almost 20% in unique visits and an additional 150,000 page views compared to July.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 101,775 [100,331]

English: 73,544 [73,474]
French: 5,777 [5,777]
Spanish: 4,177 [4,163]
Italian: 3,868 [3,873]
Turkish: 2,989 [1,897]
German: 2,497 [2,292]
Norwegian: 2,301 [2,281]
Russian: 1,945 [1,947]
Dutch: 738 [736]
Chinese: 500 [496]
Polish: 306 [306]
Portuguese: 243 [247]
Japanese: 209 [ 209]
Farsi: 201 [186]
Swedish: 189 [194]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Hebrew: 177 [157]
Danish: 153 [156]
Arabic: 160 [156]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,275 [5,227]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,956 [4,787]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,772 [4,762]
Like LabourStart page (French): 222 [213]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 60

Twitter followers –
English: 7,167 [6,920]

Union group on Flickr: 698 [694]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 991 [951]

Website

Correspondents: 1,013 [994]

Unique visits to the site this month : 599,990 [509,378]
Peak day: 23,064 [23.8.12]
Page views this month: 1,312,682 [1,164,243]

We’ve gotten a very good letter from the union, Hava-Is, which you can read here.

I`ve bumped it down to one tweet every three hours or so. I received requests for more frequent posts (we were already at one per hour), but at least one follower indicated that at that rate we were clogging his account. On the assumption that other followers felt the same and that we might lose followers as a result, I am moving to the slower rate and reminding those who wanted more (or who complain about things slowing down) that all our news remains available on the website.