Nov
28
2012
5

Sydney – 16 hours on, first thoughts about our conference

I write these words barely 16 hours after the end of the third annual LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference, held in Sydney, Australia this week.

This won’t be a full or formal report; other conference participants are invited to make their own reports and I’ll try to link to them below as I learn about them.

These are more a series of random observations than a proper report told in chronological order, but that’s all I’m capable of at the moment.

This turned out to be relatively difficult conference to organise. We had originally planned to do it in Sydney in 2011, but that fell through and we hastily convened the one in Istanbul instead. This time, we pulled together a fairly large organising committee, got a great venue for free (from the New South Wales Teachers Federation), and thought we had things under control.

But about two months ago, it became clear that the conference was in trouble so I intervened. I convinced members of the committee to move from a conference that would cost more than $100 per head to attend to a free one, and from a registration procedure that required the printing off of a form and its posting by mail to a simple online one. I also secured the involvement on a voluntary basis of Essential Media Communications, headed up by Peter Lewis, and this proved to be decisive. The conference agenda was rewritten from scratch, and the number of registered participants soared from 5 to well over 200.

The conference opened on Sunday evening with a reception at a local bar, hosted by UnionJobs.com, and this was an opportunity to meet many of the international participants. In the end we had people from more than 15 countries — the UK, Norway, Belgium, Switzerland, the USA, Fiji, the Philippines, Timor Leste, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and New Zealand — as well as Australia (including members of the Bahraini and Vietnamese communities).

The conference was formally opened by the traditional ‘welcome to country,’ delivered by a representative the indigenous population. We were reminded that the conference was held on aboriginal land and paid our respects with a moment of silence.

The two initial speakers were myself and Dave Oliver, the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Dave gave a terrific speech, the first part of which spoke very highly of the work LabourStart does and the esteem in which it is held in Australia.

The rest of the conference was a series of plenaries and workshops focussing on six different selected campaigns. These included Nissan USA (which became the subject of a LabourStart campaign launched during the conference itself), Qatar (an ITUC campaign focussing on migrant workers), Bahrain (we heard an impassioned appeal for help from Bahrainis living in Australia), China, Fiji, and Mexico (miners). The conference was privileged to hear addresses by such prominent activists as Daniel Urai, of the Fiji Trades Union Congress and Benjamin Velasco from the Philippines, who spoke about the campaign at Philippines Air Lines against outsourcing.

Monday evening the entire conference packed up and moved across town to a dinner and reception hosted by the Australian Workers Union at Trades Hall, including a display of banners and a tour of EMC’s new television studio there.

The final session on Tuesday, following detailed reports from each of the workshops, focussed on ways LabourStart can be more helpful to Australian unions

The second day saw a much smaller turnout, as expected, but there were a credible number of people in the hall and an exhausted crowd did manage to rise up from their seats to sing a rousing version of the Internationale.

Wednesday morning there was a small meeting of LabourStart correspondents including participants from Australia, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Norway and the UK. We discussed the conference that just took place, a possible conference in Berlin in May 2014, the proposed ActNOW DIY system, LabourStart’s finances and fundraising, and more.

Special thanks are due not only to the unions and individuals name above, and to all those who attended, by to members of the organizing committee including Alison, Crystal, Tony, Caroline, Michael and of course Andrew.

I encourage others who attended the conference to post their own reports and I look forward to reading these.

(more…)

Written by admin in: 2012 conference |
Nov
19
2012
0

Survey results – Labour Book of the Month

I’ve now closed the survey which got 490 responses out of about 1,700 people who were asked to participate — an extraordinarily high rate of response, which is good and shows that people are interested in what we do and that there may well be reason to continue selling books to trade unionists.  You can see a summary of the results here (there is no password protection here as it doesn’t show the nearly 300 individual comments).

In this short post, I want to focus on next steps — on things we should be considering in light of what we have learned.

As so many people commented on the price UCS was charging (and other problems, such as the lack of information about the book), I decided to look at a couple of alternatives — the unionized Powells book shop  and Amazon, both of which were for years our partners in selling books.

UCS sells the book for $17.95, Powells for $12.50 and Amazon for $12.24.  Powells also offers free shipping on orders of $50 or more.  (UCS charges the full price for shipping.

LabourStart earns 10% on a UCS sale, so make $1.79 on every title sold.  Powells pays 7.5%, so had we sold the books there, we’d have made $1.35 for each one sold.

As Amazon is an anti-union company, it may be worth considering doing some or all of our books of the month with Powells.  Or dealing directly with publishers.

Because many of the people who responded do not live in the USA, we need to into options that are cost-effective for them.  We’re already exploring UK bookstores, but need to look into other options.

Please post any of your thoughts on this subject as comments here.  Thanks.

I asked our intern, Edd, to write up a summary of what he learned from reading through the survey and the hundreds of comments — here’s what he came up with:

The most common comments are:

It’s too expensive with shipping costs for people outside the USA.

Problems with PayPal, especially for people who don’t have credit cards.

lot of people complain that they can’t see a preview of the book – like a page or an image from it. I think people expect to be able to see this more and more before they make an online purchase.
People seem to want more information generally, for example on shipping charges, or how much the US dollar price is equivalent to in their own currency. Also a lot of people wanted to know the age range it was appropriate for (saying “children’s book” is apparently not specific enough).

The significant number of people saying they were undecided (32%) suggests that reminders might be worthwhile, as long as we weren’t spamming people.

Quite a few people saying they don’t buy books through the internet. There’s not much we can do about that, except (thinking for the UK) if we had a partnership with a bookshop that has a physical presence, we can point people to that bookshop to give them the option of buying it there.

A few people said they wanted their local library to stock it – could we make an effort to sell to libraries? In fact a number of respondents to the survey said that had talked to their local libraries about stocking it, so maybe this is something we can encourage people to do in future mailouts?

Written by admin in: Publications |
Nov
19
2012
0

Pakistan campaign closes

At the request of IndustriALL we’re closing the Pakistan campaign today.  The campaign got 10,555 messages sent in 10 languages — 2,060 of those in languages other than English.

IndustriALL tells us the following about the campaign:

The factory owner for Karachi is charged for murder and is waiting for the court hearing.
Family of identified victims received compensation. However, as many of the workers do not have contracts, and bodies haven’t been found or identified, some victims have not received anything.
KIK, the brand involved in the accident offered 1million USD to compensate the victims. To date there is no concrete plan on how to distribute this.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
18
2012
1

New campaign launched – Cameroon

This is our first campaign ever with the International Federation of Musicians – please do what you can to help promote it.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
18
2012
0

Weekly roundup – 12-18.11.12

This is almost certainly going to be the last weekly summary before December — on Thursday I’m off to Sydney for the third annual LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference and will not be back before 2 December.  Some highlights from the last week:

Conference – going well, lots of last minute work dealing with people coming, cancelling, the programme, lunches, etc.  The Facebook Event page had to be cleaned up a bit as we were getting spammed.  Today – with only a week to go – we have 193 people registered to attend, of those 145 from Australia and 5 from New Zealand.

Campaigns – we got permission to close down the Pakistan campaign.  On Friday we got our first campaign request ever from the International Federation of Musicians — we’ll launch this later today.  The Guatemala campaign is two months old; I asked the sponsor what they wanted to do.  Meanwhile, the Bahrain campaign is well over 10,000 names making it one of the largest we’ve ever done.

Book of the month – we did our second one last Monday, and by Wednesday I was growing concerned that 98% of those who were clicking through to learn more about the book were not ordering it.  I then did a survey on Survey Monkey to find out why.  We got a very large number of responses (482 and counting) and I’ll close the survey tomorrow and will publish a summary here.  We’ve learned a lot, I think, from this experience.

Publicity – on Monday I was interviewed by a journalist from a Swiss-German left-wing magazine called Woz.  They did a similar interview more than a decade ago – this was the follow-up.  He strongly suggested that we work closely with LaborNet Germany – I followed up by sending a message to all three leading figures, but have not yet gotten a response.

Regional RSS feeds – I was able to fix the Caribbean region, meaning that now I should be able to get all of them working again.  But this may not happen before December, unfortunately.

Course – on Wednesday, I did a 45 minute session for the European Trade Union Institute in Brussels — they had a dozen or so trade union officials from across the continent and using Skype video, I introduced them to online campaigning.

Fundraising – we’ve now mailed our brochure and a cover letter to every president of every union in the USA.

Nov
14
2012
1

Why people aren’t buying our book of the month

48 hours after I sent out the mailing about our second LabourStart Labour Book of the Month, we had almost 1,800 (of 75,000) people click through to learn more about the book.

But of those 1,800, only 25 actually bought copies.  In other words, more than 98% of those who clicked through and looked at the book decided not to buy it — or not to buy it immediately.

We can speculate from now until the end of time about why people aren’t buying the book (the price of shipping outside the USA comes to mind), but we can also do something better thanks to fabulous tools like MailChimp and SurveyMonkey.

We can actually ask those 1,800 people — and only them — why they didn’t buy the book.

I did that this morning.

Their answers have just started to come in.  Anyone who wants to know the results, email me and I’ll send you the link to follow the poll in real time.

Written by admin in: Publications |
Nov
13
2012
2

Our biggest campaign ever?

The Bahrain campaign is just about to break the 10,000 barrier after just two weeks online, making it one of the very largest campaigns we’ve ever run.

Today I’m promoting it aggressively yet again on our Facebook page, our Facebook group, UnionBook, Twitter, etc, as well as writing to all our correspondents and putting it onto other organizations’ Facebook pages.

I’m also going to make sure that every mass mailing relevant to this campaign in every language has gone (despite the large and growing backlog of unanswered emails – sorry people).

Any other ideas?  How do we turn this into our first campaign to get 20,000 messages sent?

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
12
2012
0

Week in Review: 5-12 November 2012

Conference: 183 people are registered so far – 133 from Australia, 50 from overseas. This is an increase of 43 in the last week. The organizing committee continues weekly meetings and preparations; a lot of work is being done to promote the event.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’ve been working very hard on the IUF app (version 2) and a LabourStart app is not far behind, now that I’ve gotten the hang of this.

Fundraising: We’ve written letters to accompany our brochures to over 100 local and regional unions in the UK and over 50 union presidents in the USA.

Campaigns: We launched a new one (Mexico) on Tuesday 6.11 and closed down another (Swaziland) on Friday, 9.11. We gave our Bahrain campaign another push after we learned that one of the two unionists (Jalila) was sent off to prison. As a result, that campaign picked up over 2,000 more supporters and now has just under 10,000 messages sent, making it one of our very largest.

South Africa: One month after my push to existing South African correspondents and an effort to recruit new ones, I can report some good news. Of the last 20 South African labour news stories (posted in the last 2 days), 18 were posted by COSATU and only two by Derek.

Nov
09
2012
1

Campaign closed – Swaziland

Today after three months we closed the Swaziland campaign which got over 6,000 messages sent.  According to the Education International, which sponsored the campaign together with PSI and the ITF, “We requested the SNAT to inform us about the impact of the campaign. We will let you know as soon as we hear back from them.”

Update: We have received this from the ITF –

STAWU President General, Vusi Mabuza has this comment

“The recent global campaign on Trade Union rights violations in Swaziland conducted by LabourStart after sane reasoning by ITF, PSI and EI was a logically correct stride. It had an immeasurable contributory factor to cause for necessary self introspection on the perpetrator’s part. Our heartfelt accolades goes to the respective campaign participants.”

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
06
2012
--

New campaign launched today – Mexico

At the request of IndustriALL, we’ve gone live with this campaign today.  Please do what you can to promote.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |

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