Nov
28
2013
0

The week in review – 21-28 November 2013

Campaigns: We launched another campaign today, in support of locked out workers in the USA.  Meanwhile, our Sri Lanka campaign is doing well, with well over 8,000 messages sent — a significant number of them from Australia.  Our volunteer translators have been working very hard on the many campaigns we’ve had in the last few weeks.  We expect to very soon have another campaign in support of Korean railway workers — now being reviewed by the ITF and ITUC.  And we’ve just learned today that the 3 Cosas campaign here in London has been victorious.  They had a LabourStart campaign that was UK-only during the summer.

Berlin 2014: The organizing committee in Berlin continues to meet regularly and a draft agenda is shaping up very nicely. Last week I reported that 40 people had registered so far; today that number is 128, with the largest groups coming from the UK (19) and Germany (19).  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today.

Publications: Sales of our calendar have started to pick up — in part due to publicity we did today.   (Free shipping helps.)  This afternoon so far we’ve sold 6 of them to 6 separate individuals.  So the total so far is 197 — but I have every hope that we’ll be over 200 tomorrow and sales will continue to rise as we approach Christmas.

Upcoming meetings: Tom is attending the Unions 21 conference in London tomorrow.  I’ll be speaking next Friday in Freiburg, Germany at an academic conference on “Mobility and Civil Society: How social commitment takes place.”  Among other things, it will be an opportunity to meet German students and talk up our conference.

Articles: I submitted a piece to the ITUC’s online magazine Equal Times about the trade union movement in Georgia; it should appear next week.

This blog: I fixed a problem we were having with the new subscription module.  If you’re getting this as an email, this means it all works.

Written by admin in: 2014 conference,Campaigns,Publications |
Nov
28
2013
0

What kind of employer locks out their workers 3 days before Thanksgiving?

penelecunfairFirstEnergy sounds like a very nasty employer, having locked out 150 unionized workers three days before Thanksgiving.

They’re the target of the latest LabourStart campaign, launched at the request of IndustriALL and PSI this afternoon.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
26
2013
0

112 registrants from 39 countries – and 6 months to go!

Six months before our Global Solidarity Conference opens in Berlin, and just one day after the first mass mailing to our English list, we’re already up to 112 registrants from 39 countries. It’s just above 39% female, which is below our goal of 50%.

This is something that never happened with previous conferences, so this looks to be a very big one. 

Some of the registrants, unfortunately, are ignoring or have misunderstood our message — which I tried to make clear — that LabourStart is not paying anyone’s airfare.  Still, the vast majority of those who registered are clearly planning on attending.

The largest groups come from Germany (21) and the UK (17).

We haven’t even done our mass mailing to our German list yet — and we have 3,855 people on the German list — quite of few of whom, we hope, will attend.

Written by admin in: 2014 conference |
Nov
21
2013
0

The week in review – 14-21 November 2013

Campaigns: Three new campaigns were launched in the last week, plus we did publicity for the IUF campaign on Colombia and IndustriALL’s campaign on Iraq.  I really appreciate the incredible work done by our volunteer translators in getting these translations done.

Berlin 2014: Our conference blog is being updated, some 40 people have already registered, and we’re doing loads of publicity. On Friday, I was invited to address a meeting of global union communicators at the ITF headquarters in London about the conference.  There were participants from the ITUC, ITF, IndustriALL, PSI, etc.  I migrated the entire database of conference participants to a relational database using MySQL, which has made it much easier to display (and sort) the list of people who’ve registered.  I wrote to 10 comrades in Turkey specifically appealing for help building a Turkish contingent; no one has replied yet.  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today – click here.

Mailings to national lists: We just did a mailing to our UK list advertising a half dozen events taking place in the next month and plan to do this regularly; we encouraged people to submit their events to our online events list — and we’ll take future ones from there.  We also did a Canada-only mailing today promoting a Bangladesh garment workers’ meeting in Toronto.

Writings: I had an article in Solidarity about the successful railway workers’ strike in Georgia and have been commissioned to write something on the same subject for Equal Times.  I have also been commissioned to write about the Histadrut’s recent organizing successes for Jungle World, in Germany.

Book & calendar sales: Still sluggish.  We’ve now sold 190 calendars; our third book (Firefox OS) is up to over 160.  An attempt to promote sales of the book on the Iraqi labour movement, “Hadi Never Died”, disappointed with only two sales. Tom is preparing a calendar of trade union events in the UK at which we can sell our publications in 2014, following on the success Derek had at the CUPE convention in Canada.  Comrades — you can help by posting reviews of our books on Amazon and spreading the word about all LabourStart publications.

Social networks: Our group on Facebook is growing quite quickly, though we’re doing nothing to promote it.  66 people joined in the last week alone.  On Twitter, we’ve launched a low-key, low-cost ad campaign which has brought us 12 new followers in the last 2 days (at a cost of £2.00).

Nov
20
2013
0

A new campaign is launched – and watch what happens when you send it off

At the request of IndustriALL Global Union we’ve launched our third campaign in a week — this one in support of workers in Sri Lanka.

IndustriALL has even done a nice logo for the campaign with their logo and a version of ours.

And after you’ve sent it off, see what you get on the landing page.

 

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
17
2013
0

A new UK-only campaign is launched

Once again we’ve been asked by the RMT union to campaign in support of an industrial dispute — see here.

As these campaigns do not involve extreme violations of workers’ rights, they don’t meet the criteria for global campaigns — but we can certainly do UK-only campaigns as we’ve done in the past.

The campaign should NOT be translated and there’s no need for people from outside the UK to show their support.

Please keep this model in mind when approached by unions in your country who want campaigns that wouldn’t necessarily have a global appeal.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
15
2013
0

New campaign launched to protest jailing of union activists in Mexico

The new campaign is here.  I’ll be doing some basic publicity today, and will send out the appeal for translations over the weekend.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Nov
14
2013
0

The week(s) in review: 22 October – 14 November

I’ve not been updating this regularly enough, but a lot’s been going on over the last 24 days.

Berlin 2014: I just returned from a short visit to Berlin where I met our organizing committee.  The conference opens in a little more than 6 months and so far we’ve got a venue (Ver.di headquarters), an organizing committee, a registration form and a blog full of information — so far, so food.  Please make sure to register if you plan to come.

Kiev 2013: We had a very successful meeting of LabourStart correspondents (and potential correspondents), and our first ever rock concert last week.  See details below.  Followup has included the translation of additional pages into Russian, and signing up some new correspondents.

Firefox OS book: This was published on 24 October; sales so far have not been as high as expected, but we have sold over 140 of them.  If you’ve read the book, please make sure to post reviews to Amazon.  If you don’t have the book, please order a copy now.

The LabourStart Calendar 2014: We need to work harder to promote sales.  We sold 164 last time I reported to you, and in the last 24 days — just 11 more.  Please do what you can to promote this.

Intern: We have hired Tom Harris, who began work 8 days ago.  Edd continues to work with us one day a week.

Campaigns: Last time I reported, we were at 10,100 messages for our most recent campaign (Colombia); in the last 24 days we’ve picked up about 800 more.  We closed our Peru campaign.

Donations: We’ve received substantial donations from the FDHT in Geneva and the RMT union in London.

Upcoming travel: In December, I’ve been invited to speak about online campaigning at a conference in Freiburg, Germany.  In January, Tom and I will go to Berlin for another meeting with the conference organizers.  At the end of that month, I’ll be in Brussels to help the European Trade Union Institute plan a course — initiated by the German national trade union center DGB — on the subject of unions and the net.

Nov
12
2013
0

Come to Berlin!

Our next global solidarity conference is only 191 days away (or something like that).

But you can learn more — and register to attend — here: http://www.labourstart.org/2014

Written by admin in: 2014 conference,Uncategorized |
Nov
07
2013
1

LabourStart’s first-ever concert

IMG_8289On Sunday evening in Kiev, participants in the conference on the new trade unions and the democratic left were invited to participate in the first-ever LabourStart rock concert.

The band is a popular Russian socialist rock band known as Arkady Kos — which as named, as I’m sure you’re all aware, after the man who did the Russian translation of “The Internationale”.

It’s not every day that LabourStart gets asked to sponsor a concert and we were delighted to do so.

So who’s next?

Springsteen?

And here’s the video:

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |

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