Feb
27
2014
1

LabourStart publishes its second book in French

globallabour-frThanks so much to Andy for doing this!

Le Mouvement Ouvrier International : Une Introduction – Un guide concis des organisations syndicales mondiales is now available for purchase from CreateSpace, Amazon, etc.

Written by admin in: Publications |
Feb
21
2014
0

New campaign launched in support of jailed trade union leaders in South Korea

2183It’s not the first time we’ve been asked to do a campaign in support of our brothers and sisters in South Korea— but it’s the first time it’s tied into a “people’s strike” which is taking place there next Tuesday.

We’ll be getting a mass mailing out and texts for translation in the next few hours.

Let’s make this campaign massive!

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Feb
20
2014
0

The weeks in review – 7-20 February 2014

berlin-logo-300Berlin conference:  We’ve made lots of progress on a wide range of issues, most of the work having been done by the organizing committee in Berlin.

We’re now up to 352 registered participants from 58 countries with the largest groups coming from Germany (77), the UK (49) and Nigeria (31).

Because of the very large number of people who’ve signed up to come from Africa, we’ve actually done a mailing to all of them and have recruited some new correspondents.  We’ve also been warned that some of these will not be representatives of genuine independent and democratic trade unions and are showing caution in who gets invitation letters (to get a visa into Germany).

Because of number of registrants we did consider moving the conference to a larger venue, but the majority of members of the organizing committee decided to stick with our current venue.

We’re still putting together the agenda, organizing solidarity housing for the 147 registrants who requested it, working on the visas, dealing with interpretation into the various languages, and much more.

Only 3 months to go!

Campaigns:

  • It seems like we’re about to launch a new campaign in support of workers in Korea — details coming soon.
  • We were going to close down the Sri Lanka campaign today, after three months, but IndustriALL has requested an extension.
  • We received a lovely email from the union at the Labatt brewery where our campaign helped them win their very long strike — and we emailed our entire list about this win.
  • We also received a message updating the Huber Ballesteros campaign (see below).
  • We closed two campaigns — Mexico and a UK-only campaign but haven’t gotten updates back from either union.  It’s very important that unions which request campaigns from us report back to us on a regular basis and particularly when a campaign ends.

New language: We now have LabourStart in Hungarian — with some news already added by our only senior correspondent who speaks the language …

News interface: Now available in Italian for our Italian-speaking correspondents.

MailChimp: We’ve had our first mailings done by users other than me (which I need to approve) and these have been successful.  It’s great to share the load here.

Donations: I’ve now fixed the donations page so that if you’re donating in US dollars, the USA becomes your default country; if in Australian dollars, Australia is your default country, and so on.  This had been causing problems for some Americans trying to donate by credit card via PayPal.

Feb
07
2014
0

In Colombia, a LabourStart campaign helps win better conditions for Huber Ballesteros

We’ve just received the attached message from Justice for Colombia.  Our campaign in support of jailed trade union leader Huber Ballesteros has resulted in some improvements:

He was finally moved to a different wing of the prison, where the conditions are better than where he was previously being held, with less overcrowding and a cleaner environment. He now has his own cell, whereas before he was sharing with 3 other men, one of whom was a paramilitary which was very dangerous for him. The wing where he is now also has different rules for visitors, so family and friends are able to bring him food on Sundays. This is very important as Huber suffers from diabetes and has been denied the special diet he needs from the prison authorities, so it is essential that he can be provided with food for a good balanced meal at least once a week.  The authorities are considering his request to be able to write a book whilst he is in prison. [For the full text, click here – huber ]

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Feb
07
2014
0

The week in review – 31 January – 7 February 2014

Campaigns: I’ve fixed two things that were nagging me — (1) When signing up to support a campaign, you now must choose a country, and “Select a counrtry” doesn’t count.  Previously, we had “Afghanistan” as our first country and had large numbers of people ignoring this and letting that remain.  They’re now being forced to choose.  (2) You now have to enter a valid email address, with a “@” and full stops (periods).  Obviously we’re not completely testing, and some invalid email addresses will slip through., but at least you have to enter something that remotely looks like an email address.

News: See below — this should help expand the reach of our news stories.  (I’ve written to all our correspondents about this today.)

Mailing list: I’ve invited a number of senior correspondents and translators who already do mass mailngs to use MailChimp directly — and very pleased to see that several have taken me up on the offer.  This should speed things up a bit when sending out mailings.  We’ve nearly completed the migration of our language mailing lists from Sendy to MailChimp.

Berlin conference: Lots happening — details to come.

Interface for adding news: Our Finnish and (soon) Italian correspondents will have an interface in their languages when they post news.  This is already the case with a number of the languages.

Books: We’re making progress on the Dan Gallin book, which is already several hundred pages long.  Andy has translated the global labour book into French.  Tom is doing an inventory of books in the office and calculating how many we’ve sold in the first year as a publisher.

Dates of news stories: The dates appearing next to news stories now appear in the more standard dd-mm-yyyy format — an improvement suggested by Andy.

Campaigns:  There are a couple of suggested new ones.  Meanwhile, we closed the Fiji campaign — a big win.

Articles: I had two more articles appear on the KESK trial in Turkey — in Labor Notes and OpenDemocracy.net.

Feb
07
2014
0

Getting trade union news out to a much wider audience

facebook16twitter16Every news story on LabourStart, in every language, and even on our country and state/province pages, now has a Twitter and Facebook icon next to it. I completed the writing of the code for this today.  Click on the icons and you can tweet the story or post it to Facebook.  (You need to be logged into Twitter or Facebook to do this.)  This will (potentially) greatly expand the readership of these stories and provide a huge boost to unions trying to get their message out to an international audience.  Try it out!

Written by admin in: News database,Social networks,Twitter |
Feb
04
2014
1

LabourStart in Numbers – January 2014

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below.  Notable growth is indicated in bold, green. (more…)

Feb
04
2014
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