Dec
30
2014
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The month in review – December 2014

Next generation LabourStart

The number of users of our Android app in English, launched on 11 November, has grown to 587 (gained only 25 new users in December); the average reviewer gave it 4.88 stars. Our Android app in Esperanto, launched on 26 November, has been installed 17 times.

Our iOS app (for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) has just been approved by the Apple App store (we submitted it on 3 December at first) and will be launched in the next two days. This app was designed in Como, which we can use to create apps for both Android and iOS, and will do so.

We have received the translation for the Norwegian version of our apps and expect this go live shortly.

Tunis Retreat

We’ll have more to report on this throughout January.

A reminder was sent to all correspondents to respond to the pre-retreat survey; so far we’ve had 58 responses and will provide a full report soon.

Campaigns

We launched only two campaigns in December and closed one of them fairly quickly at the request of the union – these were the ones surrounding the jailing of Colombian union leader Huber Ballesteros, and the other concerned Luis Isarra in Peru. The Peru campaign has generated only 5,634 messages of protest so far, while the Colombia campaign generated 7,450.

We closed three campaigns in December — Deva in Turkey, USA IKEA and the Colombia industrial accident campaign, which resulted in a big win.

At the moment, we are running only four active campaigns — and three of those will close within the next four weeks.

A trade union leader in Bangladesh has offered to translate our campaigns into Bengali; I have sent him the framework file to translate.

We launched our first Romanian language campaign, and mailing list.

Online campaigning course

The European Trade Union Institute has approved our proposal for a 3-day course on the subject of online campaigning, to be held in Germany in June. More details soon.

Books

Our latest book, Dan Gallin’s Solidarity, is being translated into Russian by Masha.

I’ve signed a contract with Professor Joe Atkins for a LabourStart book due to appear at the end of 2015 about migrant workers. More details coming soon.

Finances

We received a generous donation from the Education International.

I wrote to all correspondents about the annual Svennsson prize which could be major boost to LabourStart if we ever win it.

Fairphone

We ran a mini-campaign to raise the issue of workers’ rights at Fairphone, which briefly got a lot of attention and a phone call from the company.

Tweaks

We learned (from Mahesh) that there was a problem with our code that allowed people to tweet any news story that appeared on LabourStart — if there was an apostrophe in the story title, it didn’t work. This has now been fixed.

I also fixed the drop down menu showing country names on the French language home page, and a couple of other small fixes to the page.

Dec
15
2014
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Two campaigns closed, two big wins, and a new campaign launched today

In the last couple of days we’ve closed down two of our campaigns — and one of them was a big win for the union.  Today we launched a new campaign — or more correctly, a new version of a campaign we’ve done before.  And finally, we helped the IUF with one of the shortest campaigns they (or we) have ever run, resulting in a big win.

The campaigns we closed today are:

USA: IKEA must raise pay, offer full-time jobs which had 4,193 supporters. We asked the UFCW what the result of the campaign but haven’t yet heard back.

Colombia: Desperate fight for recognition of workplace accident This was a big win. Here is what IndustriALL told us:

“With sense of relieve and satisfaction we announce that Ruben Montoya had received his pension and has reached a financial settlement with Tenaris. Ruben Montoya is a worker who suffered a workplace accident 12 years ago that was never recognized by the company; who declared a hunger strike almost a year ago and attempted suicide twice asking for the pension that he has finally received. The persistence and courage of Reuben, the accompaniment and mobilization of SINTRATUCAR and the international support made it possible to reach a solution to this problem. From the Tenaris Workers’ World Council we sincerely appreciate the participation of all in this campaign and we hope that Rubén will receive medical treatment needed and have the deserved tranquility to recover from such a tragic event. The last meeting of the Tenaris Workers’ World Council approved several actions in support of Rubén. Those actions are no longer necessary.”

Today we launched a new campaign in defense of Huber Ballesteros– launched last week, on the eve of Human Rights Day, at the request of UNISON. We did a version of this same campaign a year ago, but as Huber’s case is still unresolved, we’ve been asked to do this again.

Finally, we also did some publicity last week for the IUF campaign demanding the release of jailed trade unionists in Hong Kong; our efforts and those of others helped secure their early release.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Dec
04
2014
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Trade union rights campaign that links to climate change

2594This is an interesting one — a campaign given to us by Public Services International (PSI) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

It concerns a trade union leader in Peru (Luis Isarra, pictured left) who is being punished for his role fighting against water privatisation on the very eve of the UN Climate Change conference to be held in Lima next week.

This campaign could resonate with both our traditional trade union audience and climate change campaigners.

Please spread the word:

http://www.labourstart.org/go/cop20

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Dec
01
2014
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LabourStart in Numbers – November 2014

With only one new campaign launched in November – and that at the very end of the month – we’re not seeing big changes to our mailing lists.

This month, however, we can welcome Swedish to the list as it now has over 200 subscribers.

We’ve also seen very good growth to our Twitter feeds — with a spectacular increase to our small Indonesian feed.

Mailing lists with 200 or more subscribers – the second number is from the previous month

English: 85,619 – 85,672
French: 8,186 – 8,166
German: 5,524 – 5,503
Spanish: 5,355 – 5,328
Italian: 4,085 – 4,097
Turkish: 3,614 – 3,579
Korean: 3,080 – 3,080
Norwegian: 2,813 – 2,804
Russian: 2,466 – 2,468
Dutch: 1,687 – 1,675
Chinese: 1,106 – 1,106
Polish: 752 – 752
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 483 – 483
Arabic: 463 – 463
Portuguese: 353 – 353
Indonesian: 344 – 343
Hebrew: 271 – 266
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 -242
Swedish: 205

Other ways to count …

As there was no comprehensive report last month, the second numbers here are from two months ago.

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 13,479 – 13,125
Canada English: 3,725 – 3,511
Canada French: 619 – 571
USA: 430 – 405
French: 217 – 214
Indonesia: 150 – 99
Spanish: 73 – 74
German: 70 – 69
Japanese: 22 -22
Russian: 18 – 18
Portuguese: 7 – 7

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 9,019 – 8,891
Members of LabourStart group: 8,205 – 8,111
Like LabourStart page (French): 458 – 450
Like LabourStart page (German): 392 – 376
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 144 – 141
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 112 – 111

UnionBook

Members: 5,842 – 5,820

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,815 – 1,764

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 787 – 785

Website

Correspondents: 759 – 746

There is no report on website traffic this month as I’m not sure Click is correctly counting visits.

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