Jan
29
2015
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Week 4 of 2015: Deepening cooperation with the European Trade Union Institute

I’ve just come back from two days in Brussels where I had meetings at the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) and also with Silvio Gonzato, Director of Human Rights and Democracy at the European External Action Service.

ETUI will be holding a course which I proposed at the DGB (German national trade union centre) education center in Hattingen from 24-26 June 2015 which will focus primarily on LabourStart campaigns — and which will culminate in the live launch of an actual campaign. Invitations will go out in the next month or two.

Also ETUI has offered extensive cooperation with us in the holding of our 2015 Strategic Retreat — more details soon.  A big thanks to Silvana for all her help setting up these important meetings and deepening our cooperation with European trade union institutions.

In other news this week, we picked up nearly 300 new subscribers to our mailing lists. Our Lafarge Holcim campaign has now grown to over 8,000 messages; our Turkish health care workers campaign is one of our largest with 10,340 supporters; and we’ll shortly be closing our USA Zara campaign which only got 7,769 supporters in the three months it was online.

We’re making slow progress on publications — we have a Flickr group set up to receive candidate photos for our Global Labour Calendar; work continues on the migrant labour book; I’m waiting for some more documents before we can progress on our Global Crisis, Global Solidarity book.

We published links to an average of 193 news stories per day, every day in January so far, for a total of over 5,400 news stories.  74 of our correspondents have been active posting news in January — out of 763 correspondents.  In other words, over 90% of the correspondents did not post news in January.  Of those who did, 12 posted 100 or more stories.  If you’re reading this and are an inactive LabourStart correspondent and need help (don’t remember your password, or have forgotten how to add news), please don’t hesitate to write to me – ericlee@labourstart.org.

Jan
29
2015
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Berlin LabourStart Group speaks out on the Greek elections

Gisela writes:

On the eve of the Greek elections, which brought a huge victory for the decidedly left-wing Syriza and will – hopefully – challenge and change the austerity discussion in Europe a good deal, 285 German individuals and organisations published an open letter to the Greek public in a Greek newspaper, EFSYN. In the letter, they spoke out in defense of the freedom of the Greek people to decide themselves on their government, and against the interference particularly by German politicians and media in the pre-election debate. It condemns the threats and bullying, and expresses solidarity with the social forces that want to change the political and economic course in Greece, pointing out that their victory could change whole political debate in Europe.

The LabourStart Berlin offline group, founded after last May’s LS conference in Berlin, decided unanimously that we’d support the initiative. Our signature appeared, together with the others, on two different days in the week before the election and was seen by tens of thousands of readers. We don’t claim, of course, we’ve won the elections – that was the Greeks choice, in the end! – but we hope to have contributed a little bit to balance out the power play of the European neoliberal camp, and to building transnational worker solidarity against neoliberal austerity policies and the onslaught on social and political rights in Europe.

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Jan
21
2015
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Retreat postponed, campaign launched, work begins on our calendar – a review of week 3 of 2015

2015 Retreat: The Tunis retreat planned for March has been postponed. More details soon.

Campaigns

Holcim Lafarge: This campaign, launched last week, only had 5,000 supporters after the first 7 days, so I did a followup mailing to nearly 82,000 people on the English list who hadn’t yet signed up, according to MailChimp. As a result, we increased the number of supporters by more than a third, and are now just under 6,800. This number will rise as we get the campaign active in both German and Italian, two of our largest languages.

Istanbul Maltepe Hospital: This campaign is one of our largest, and now has just under 10,000 supporters, as we pick up another 700 this week.

Publications

Global Labour Calendar: A group of 7 of us have begun discussions of how to do this, focussing on how to print it, select the photos, and add the contents (labour history dates).

Global Crisis, Global Solidarity: I’m trying to move forward on publishing the papers presented at our 2014 conference, but we received very few of them and am now looking to find the workshop summaries which might give us more content.

Annual survey of trade union use of the net: I’ve written to our entire mailing list to try to get some help with volunteers to do this again.

Written by admin in: 2015 Retreat,Campaigns,Publications,Surveys |
Jan
15
2015
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Three campaigns, three publications, two surveys, one conference – week 2 of 2015 on LabourStart

2015 has gotten off to a brisk start.  Here’s my report on week 2:

Campaigns:

  • We launched one in support of sacked hospital workers in Turkey — our first campaign of 2015.  It’s already had 9,348 supporters in the last seven days and is likely to pass 10,000 shortly, making it our largest currently active campaign.  The campaign appears in 18 languages, including Chinese for the first time in a very long time. PSI and EPSU added themselves as supporters after a few days. The campaign can be found here: http://www.labourstart.org/go/maltepe
  • Today we’re launching another campaign in cooperation with IndustriALL, BWI and EFBWW, demanding that the merger of Holcim and Lafarge take workers’ rights into account.  That campaign is here: http://www.labourstart.org/go/nomerger
  • I closed the WIPO campaign after 3 months and 6,254 messages sent, but have not yet heard back from the union; we don’t know what effect, if any, the campaign had.  It is unfortunate that sometimes our partners do this, and neglect to keep us and our supporters informed.

Surveys:

  • We’ve gotten some volunteers and some ideas for our (almost) annual survey of trade union use of the net.  More details next week.
  • I’ll soon be publishing a detailed report on the results of our survey of LabourStart correspondents.

Publications:

  • A number of people have volunteered to help with our Global Labour Calendar for 2016.  People have stepped up with ideas on how to print it, to help add labour history content to it, and to translate it — well done! More details coming soon.
  • We’ve now exchanged contracts with Prof. Joe Atkins for The Strangers Among Us: Tales from a Global Migrant Labor Movement, a collection of essays which we will publish at the very end of this year.
  • I’ve resumed work on getting out Global Crisis, Global Solidarity — our book of conference papers, long overdue.

Retreat 2015:

  • We’ve had some discussions about this; more details next week when I know them.

Internationalization:

  • We now have a Swedish-language Twitter feed and Facebook page which we’ll publicize next week.
  • I had a full day with our senior correspondent in the Caribbean, Dave Smith, and we discussed a number of issues relating to LabourStart’s activities in that region.

Apps:

  • Dave pointed out a problem with the display of regional news on the Android app which I will fix.
  • I have had an ongoing discussion with Como support about how the RSS feeds are displayed on our app.  A similar discussion with Andromo support led them to make a change in how they handle RSS feeds which should take effect soon.  Como and Andromo are two online tools we use (and pay for) to build our apps.
Jan
08
2015
0

Our first campaign of 2015 goes live

maltepe300Hospital workers in Istanbul, sacked for joining a union, and on the picket line for nearly a month in often-freezing temperatures have appealed to us to launch a global campaign demanding their reinstatement.

It’s our first campaign in 2015 — let’s spread the word and make sure it’s a success.

The campaign is here:

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

Spread the word!

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Jan
06
2015
1

Tunis, apps, publications, survey, Italy, course, Brazil, and more – another week on LabourStart

I’ve decided to post weekly reports on what’s going on at LabourStart — please feel free to share these with colleagues and friends.  2015 is going to be one our busiest years ever — and here’s the first week …

Retreat – Tunis: We’re moving on this; I’ve sent the necessary letters regarding hotels and meeting space to our friends in the UGTT in Tunisia.  More on this next week.

Apps:

We’re using two different app-building platforms each of which has drawbacks.  Como builds both for Android and iOS, but it handles RSS feeds badly (it takes two clicks, not one, to show a news story.)  I’ve written to them to get help on this.

Meanwhile, Andromo which is better (and has improved at my suggestion how they cache RSS feeds, because at the moment they show our closed campaigns) unfortunately only works in Android.  This is what is holding up the release of our iOS app (approved by the Apple store, but I’m not satisfied with how it works) and our apps in other languages.

Meanwhile, our Android app has been published in the Amazon store, so users of Amazon’s devices (Kindle, Firephone, etc) can use it; also, users of Blackberries can get their version of the app there.

Publications: We’ll probably begin work on the 2016 Global Labour Calendar this coming week.  Anyone who’s willing to help is invited to post comments below.  We’re also working on two books we’re committed to getting out this year — one on migrant workers, and one with papers and speeches from our Berlin conference last May (long delayed, I know).  (Thanks to Derek for helping on this.)

Survey of trade union use the net: I’ve suggested we consider doing this again; so far, three people have volunteered to help, so next week we’ll probably start work on this again.  (Thanks to Derek, David and Gerhard.)

Italian LabourStart: We now have a Twitter feed and and an email address, and a group of committed correspondents and translators.   The Italian mailing list is our fourth-largest with over 4,000 addresses, and we’re keen to grow it and to be more useful to the Italian unions.  (Thanks Silvana and Andrea.)

Guidelines for new correspondents: This has now been translated into Spanish.  (Thanks David).

Survey of LabourStart correspondents: I’ll make the results available in a few days, but one result is clear: most people do want a discussion forum.  I’ve looked into a couple of the better known options, but will be asking for volunteers to help with this project.  (Thanks to Gisela for doing the survey.)

Online campaigns course: I’ve begun planning for a meeting in Brussels later this month with the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) which has agreed to hold a 3-day course in Germany for European trade unionists.

Brazil project: As you may know, we have received a grant to do some work building LabourStart in Brazil.  I’ve started writing to our contacts there.

LabourStart in Numbers: I’ve done the last monthly report; from now on, this will be done every quarter.

 

 

Jan
05
2015
4

Fourth survey of trade union use of the net

We’ve done three annual  surveys of trade union use of the net; the most recent one in early 2013.  (Here’s the report.)

These surveys have gotten fairly significant numbers of participants – 2,746 last time (+377 more in French); 2,605 in 2012 (+349 in French); and 1,336 in 2011 (Survey was done only in English then).

Should we do on in 2015?

And would one of you be willing to volunteer to craft the survey, arrange the translations (ideally not only French this time) and produce a short report on the results?  I’m happy to help with the technical side and publicity.

Please reply using the comments below so that everyone can see any discussion that takes place.

Thanks!

 

Written by admin in: Surveys |
Jan
04
2015
--

LabourStart in Numbers – December 2014

The next report will appear on April 1st as this will from now on be a quarterly report, not monthly.

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

English: 85,230 – 85,619
French: 8,202 – 8,186
German: 5,568 – 5,524
Spanish: 5,414 – 5,355
Italian: 4,088 – 4,085
Turkish: 3,668 – 3,614
Korean: 3,080 – 3,080
Norwegian: 2,801 – 2,813
Russian: 2,466 – 2,466
Dutch: 1,695 – 1,687
Chinese: 1,106 – 1,106
Polish: 752 – 752
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 483 – 483
Arabic: 463 – 463
Portuguese: 353 – 353
Indonesian: 344 – 344
Hebrew: 270 – 271
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242
Swedish: 236 – 205

Other ways to count …

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 13,646 – 13,479
Canada English: 3,800 – 3,725
Canada French: 624 – 619
USA: 442 – 430
French: 218 – 217
Indonesia: 179 – 150
Spanish: 73 – 73
German: 71 – 70
Japanese: 22 – 22
Russian: 18 – 18
Italian: 14 (new account)
Portuguese: 7 – 7

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 9,112 – 9,019
Members of LabourStart group: 8,258 – 8,205
Like LabourStart page (French): 463 – 458
Like LabourStart page (German): 391 – 392
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 144 – 144
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 112 – 112

UnionBook

Members: 5,846 – 5,842

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,835 – 1,815

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 786 – 787

Website

Correspondents: 762 – 759

For December 2014  – Please note that in some cases, counting did not begin on the 1st of the month, so the numbers will not be complete. Also, December is a notoriously weak month, with many people no longer in school or at work for the last third or more of the month.

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 7,869

Top countries (by sessions):
USA 26%
Australia 20%
Canada 10%
India 6%
UK 6%

Most popular pages (% of pageviews):
Home page – English 42%
USA – English 11%
Canada – English 5%
India – 4%
UK – English 2%

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 10,810

Top countries (by sessions):
UK 16%
USA 11%
Canada 10%
Germany 7%
Spain 6%

Most popular pages (% of pageviews):
Colombia: Free Huber Ballesteros – 37%
World Intellectual Property Organization fires staff union president – 8%
Peru: Attack on trade union rights on eve of climate change summit – 8%
Wizz Air: Stop union-busting now! – 7%
Freiheit für Huber Ballesteros! – 5%

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