Aug
31
2016
2

Subdomains – a useful shortcut?

LabourStart has five working subdomains – we used to have more, but our internet hosting company screwed these up, so I’ve rebuilt some of the essential ones.

As you can see from the list below, we can use these to point to our global editions in a particular language (e.g., Esperanto), or to a particular country (e.g., the UK), or a country in a specific language (e.g., Brazilian news in Portuguese). Here they are:

Would it be useful to create more of these?  They need to be done one at a time, but they could be useful especially when creating offline materials (these are shorter addresses to remember).

So for example, do we want no.labourstart.org in addition to http://www.labourstart.org/news/index.php?langcode=no ?

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Aug
30
2016
0

Victory in Turkey

Today we closed our 3-month-old campaign in support of forestry workers in Turkey, launched at the request of BWI. The campaign had 6,736 supporters and appeared in 15 languages.  We have been thanked by BWI for our efforts, and sent this statement:

Turkey: Win for workers struggling to save the forests in Cerattepe

The mining project that risks destroying the forests, jobs and water for the people in the Artvin province in Turkey has been halted following a court decision. The local people and members of the union TARIM ORMAN-IS who have supported the struggle is celebrating a big victory after the Council of State in July rejected an expert report that claimed that they would be able to protect the environment while mining.

Since 2012, the Turkish company “Cengiz Holding” has tried to mine gold, silver and copper in “Cerattepe”, a small district of Artvin province in northern Turkey. Local people have been resisting the mining plans to protect the natural resources in their village with the support of various NGOs and political parties. The forestry workers’ union and BWI affiliate TARIM ORMAN-IS has supported the struggle in the area since the beginning of the resistance. More than 6600 people signed the online petition that the union initiated to protect workers’ rights and environment in Cerattepe.

In December 2014, 264 complainants, including lawyers, associations, political parties, Green Artvin Association and TARIM ORMAN-IS, opened a case against the Environmental Impact Report which claimed that there are effective methods to protect ecologic conditions while mining. In 2015, the local court rejected the report that favored mining activities. Following this, the company appealed the decision to the Council of State – the highest court of cases related to administrative law – and requested a new Environmental Impact Report. These reports are prepared by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanisation to assess the environmental impacts in order to reinforce or prevent the implementation of such projects.

In July 2016, the Council of State finally approved the local court’s rejection of the first Environmental Impact Report which means that the project is halted. Unfortunately, the decision does not mean that the mining project is cancelled completely. As the company has a new Environmental Impact Report which supports the mining activities in the area, a new case was opened in June 2015 with 751 complainants for the rejection of the second report — the biggest environmental case in Turkey. Therefore, people are now waiting for the final decision for this ongoing court case and hope that this will also be ended with a verdict similar to the decision of the Council of State to block mining efforts in Cerattepe.

The struggle for workers’ rights and natural resources has gained strength and addition to the abovementioned decision, the pressure on forest workers in Cerattepe has also been removed with the help of support from all over the world. In this regard, TARIM ORMAN-IS, Green Artvin Association and the BWI would like to thank all supporters who signed the campaign and showed their solidarity.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Aug
29
2016
0

Number of Facebook followers grows – but we have more work to do

We now have 11,258 followers of our LabourStart Facebook page in English — a big improvement.  We had 10,689 a little more than a week ago, so we’ve picked up 569 new ones in just about a week.  In the previous year, we’d picked up only 611, so this a very significant increase.  Nevertheless, we still have our work cut out for us.  Here are some similar pages on Facebook for comparison:

  1. ILO – 285,993
  2. UNI Global Union – 53,891
  3. Education International – 29,047
  4. Trades Union Congress (UK) – 25,178
  5. International Labor Rights Forum – 22,612
  6. IUF – 21,700
  7. LabourStart – 11,258
  8. Union Solidarity International – 10,794
  9. ITUC – 10,032
  10. IndustriALL – 8,528
  11. ITF – 6,478
  12. PSI – 6,397
  13. IFJ – 4,971
  14. European Trade Union Confederation – 2,756
  15. TUAC – 117

 

 

 

Written by admin in: Social networks |
Aug
26
2016
0

LabourStart is hiring – again

This message is going out today to our UK mailing list:

LabourStart is hiring!

Once again, we’re hiring an intern — to be paid the London Living Wage — and starting in October.

Everything you need to know is here:

http://www.labourstart.org/intern.shtml

Please pay special attention to these details:

  • This internship is available only to residents of the UK as it requires a presence in London.
  • And please, do not phone — we are only responding to emails.
Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Aug
24
2016
0

Another campaign closed – Israel Amdocs

After three months online, this week we closed the campaign in support of Amdocs workers in Israel.

The campaign got the support of 3,013 people and appeared in 12 languages.

We don’t yet know what effect if any it had, but are waiting to hear from the Histadrut about this.

We now have 7 active campaigns, another one of which we will almost certainly be closing this week.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Aug
22
2016
0

Growing our audience on Facebook

LabourStart has had both a Page and Group on Facebook in English for several years, and has groups, pages and other accounts in other languages as well.  But growth to the English page, which we use to promote both top stories and our campaigns, has stalled recently.

Our English global page on Facebook - picking up nearly 2 new followers per hour.

Our English global page on Facebook – picking up nearly 2 new followers per hour.

A year ago, we had 10,078 followers of our main Facebook page in English; by the end of last week, that had risen to just 10,689 — a gain of only 611 new people in a whole year, or less than two per day.

I took two steps to increase our audience on Facebook which has resulted in significant gains for us.

First, I invited 225 of my Facebook friends to like LabourStart’s page.

And second, I purchased an inexpensive Facebook ad to promote the page.

As a result, we’re up to 10,828, a gain of 139 in just 3 days, or an average of 46 new followers per day.

You can help by inviting all of your Friends to like our Facebook page — do this from our page at https://www.facebook.com/labourstart.org/

Written by admin in: Social networks |
Aug
20
2016
0

Brasil!

No, not the Olympics.  But Euan Gibb has been hard at work for the last year promoting LabourStart to Brazilian trade unionists and he’s produced an impressive report on what’s been accomplished so far.

Click here to read the report:

LabourStart 1-Year Report – Brasil-1

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Aug
18
2016
0

The August slump — and how you can help us cope

school-closedAugust is a month when many our readers go on holiday; some unions maintain only skeletal staffs.  The only comparable time of year is Christmas, when many union headquarters simply shut down for a week or two. As a result, our campaigns launched at this time of year tend to do rather poorly.

Of our 7 current campaigns, none have more than 6,700 supporters.  We usually have at least one with 10,000 or more, but that’s not the case in summer.

The most recent campaign on Ecuador, where the government is trying to break the teachers’ union, is a case in point.  This would normally be quite a large campaign, and we would expect many members of teachers’ unions to be signing up.  But this is not the case.  (And teachers often do get a summer break, which may explain why many of them are not online to respond to the appeal.)

I’d like your help to promote this campaign — which is available in 13 languages — and to help bring it up from its current 5,104 supporters to a more respectable number.  How do we do this?  Here are some ideas:

  1. If you know anyone in the teachers’ union in your country or region, can you please write directly to them, sending a personal email encouraging them to get involved and sign up their members?
  2. Can you share the campaign’s URL – http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=3156 – in an email message to your trade union contacts, including those who are not teachers?  This is a major violation of workers rights and should be the concern of workers everywhere.
  3. If you have an account on Facebook, can you post that link, telling people that you supported this campaign and encouraging them to do the same?
  4. If you are fluent in a language which is NOT one of the 13 this campaign appears in, can you help us translate the campaign and mass mailing?  We are missing translations, for example, into Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Arabic and Chinese and yet we have mailing lists in those languages, with thousands of names of trade unionists who would support this campaign if they only knew about it.
  5. Finally, can you print out the campaign page and a numbered list, and ask people at meetings if they would support the campaign?  If you get a list of people who support it, please send us their names and email addresses (ideally in a plain text file) and do indicate which language they speak, so we can add them to the correct mailing list.

Thanks very much!

Written by admin in: Campaigns |
Aug
09
2016
0

The kind of news story that makes LabourStart special

Where else would trade unionists go to learn about this story?

I was very happy to discover this news story on LabourStart today.  

I know that our volunteer correspondents trawl the net every day and find over 200 labour news stories every day, which is amazing.  Many of them are already familiar to people who follow the news, but we add value by offering comprehensive coverage of stories that otherwise get little play.

But this story is exactly the sort of thing our readers won’t normally come across, that’s not being talked about on the traditional left and labour websites, and yet is the classic example of a labour news story.

Thanks to our correspondent Andrew Casey for finding it!

Written by admin in: Uncategorized |
Aug
08
2016
0

Another popular campaign is closed

Orhan Akman.

After three months online, we today closed the campaign in support of Orhan Akman, a UNI Global Union organizer who was expelled from Peru.

The campaign had 7,640 supporters and was our largest campaign at the moment we closed it.

We’re waiting to hear from our partners what effect the campaign has had.

Written by admin in: Campaigns |

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