Inside LabourStart

See here.

A new article in two different versions, in German, about LabourStart — very positive.  Here and here.

That’s right — for the first time, we’re being called upon to defend someone who has been a LabourStart correspondent for several years, Andy Hall.  Andy, who has worked in Thailand, recently did a report for an NGO highlighting claims of abusive and exploitative policies at a company there, alleging among other things the illegal employment of child labour.  The company has now taken him to court, and if convicted, Andy will not only be subject to a potential fine of millions of Euros, but an actual jail term of several years.  We’ve been asked by two GUFs — BWI and UNI — to take on this case, and are happy to do so.  Please do all you can to promote this campaign.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 76,648 [76,322]
French: 5,868 [5,893]
Spanish: 4,462 [4,504]
Italian: 3,888 [3,888]
Turkish: 3,116 [3,116]
German: 2,798 [2,614]
Norwegian: 2,369 [2,369]
Russian: 1,951 [1,951]
Dutch: 885 [885]
Chinese: 717 [716]
Finnish: 548 [546]
Polish: 318 [318]
Arabic: 267 [252]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese: 240 [240]
Hebrew: 209 [208]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Tagalog: 205 [205]
Swedish: 183 [183]
Korean 150 [150]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian : 116 [109]
Czech: 96 [96]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 8,881 [8,659]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,387 [6,327]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,925 [4,909]
Like LabourStart page (French): 294 [279]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 96 [92]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,481 [5,440]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,233 [1,194]

Union group on Flickr: 720 [720]

Website

Correspondents: 624 [613]

I was away on vacation during most of this period, so this report will be relatively brief.

Fix to front page: We often have a problem when a month ends — it won’t correctly show news from the last 48 hours.  I have now fixed this on the new home page in English.  Today, it shows news from 1 April and 31 March.

Book sales: We’ve now distributed 748 copies of our book on online campaigning; of those 704 were sales and 44 were review copies and gifts (to translators and others).  Of those 748, 75 were in French and the rest in English.  In March, sales of the French version were three times as high as the English one.  We expect a German translation of the book shortly.

Campaigns – new: We launched a campaign in support of LabourStart correspondent Andy Hall in Thailand, but are waiting for a revised (shortened) version of the text before beginning extensive publicity.  This campaign was initiated by UNI and BWI in the Asia Pacific region.

Campaigns – upcoming: We may be asked to launch campaigns in the next few days for Turkey, Guatemala, Honduras and Pakistan — all of these from GUFs we work with regularly.

New languages: We’re just about ready to launch our first campaign in Thai.

NASUWT annual conference: I spoke at this yesterday (the NASUWT is Britain’s largest teachers’ union, with 300 members)  on a panel on international solidarity — Jalila Al-Salman, vice president of the Bahrain Teachers Association, sat next to me, and thanked LabourStart for what we did.  I gave her a signed copy of our book (and sold several others).

Annual survey of trade union use of the net: We completed this on 22 March and published a summary here.