Inside LabourStart

I was travelling for most of the last two weeks, but here are some updates anyway.

Campaigns:

• We launched a new campaign in support of Kenyan truckers at the request of the International Transport Workers Federation.  Over 5,300 people have already signed up to support the campaign.
• We closed down the Rio Tinto Valentine’s Day campaign at the request of IndustriALL and the Peru campaign given to us by Public Services International.  The campaign got over 9,000 messages sent to the company and definitely got their attention.
• We did a followup mailing and additional publicity in support of sacked Ecuadorian union activist Jimena Lopez, adding another 1,110 new supporters to the campaign. Increasingly we do followup mailings to people who didn’t open the first message and this produces good results.  That campaign has just over 8,000 supporters.
• We now have a new template for our mass mailings which includes some good links not just to forward the mail but to post to Facebook, Twitter, etc.

International Women’s Day:

• We sent all correspondents a link to short instructional video on how to tag working women’s news stories on LabourStart. (We’ll be making more videos like this – let me know what you’d like done.)

Campaigns:

We launched a new campaign yesterday in support of the ITF’s fight to get Ecuadorian trade unionist Jimena Lopez reinstated. The campaign is linked to International Women’s Day. In less than 24 hours, the campaign was live in three languages and had just under 3,000 supporters.

We did a special mailing on Monday in support of forestry workers in Gabon. They approached us for help, we turned to BWI and BWI have done their own online campaign which we’re supporting.  As a result of our effort, over 5,000 people visited their campaign page.

We’re about to close another Latin American campaign – this one was launched on the eve of the climate change summit in Peru. It was a somewhat small campaign for us, getting fewer than 6,000 supporters. I’ve asked PSI to update us on the results.

The fight with Rio Tinto has heated up. Tonight there’s a conference call with all the partners, led by IndustriALL — I’ll let you all know what’s happened. That campaign has already sent over 9,000 messages of protest, and the company is rather upset about all this.

Our largest current campaign remains the Turkish health care workers, with 10,639 supporters, a gain of 99 in the last 6 days. Some comrades in the UK have begun an effort to do a paper version of this campaign, and will be inputting the signatures manually.

IndustriALL have decided to use a different campaigning platform for their upcoming Turkey campaign which looks likely to be a big one.

Working Women’s News Page:

This has been updated and promoted, and we’ve gotten several more volunteer correspondents as a result. The page is here: http://www.labourstart.org/women The next step, I think, is to create pages in languages other than English. Any suggestions for pages we should be linking to are most welcome.

Correspondents’ forum:

I’ve downloaded some forum software we haven’t used before and will begin setting it up in order to test it. Update coming soon.

Solidarity Retreat 2015:

I’ve arranged a meeting with the European Trade Union Institute on 7 April in Brussels; I hope to be able to nail down dates before then if possible.

New contact details:

We have a new generic inbox for LabourStart — info@labourstart.org. Expect to see more and more of this address being used.

We also have a new mailing address:

LabourStart
Suite 504
394 Muswell Hill Broadway
London N10 1DJ
U.K.

UnionBook:

We’ve sent a long list of issues to Ning, which is the platform we use for UnionBook, and have gotten a detailed response today. One of our more enthusiastic UnionBook members has been working on this, but the site remains largely dormant, though it has 5,857 members.