Dec
30
2020
0

Our 2020 Year-end Mailing

As 2020 draws to an end, I wanted to pause for a moment and review some of the things we were able to accomplish under the most difficult circumstances during this terrible year.

According to our statistics, our volunteer correspondents around the world posted 56,040 news stories to our site this year.  That’s an average of 154 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news.  Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news.  Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

In addition to our news, this year we ran 24 campaigns in support of workers and their unions.

Those campaigns focussed on struggles in Belarus, Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Germany, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Peru, Turkey, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to the efforts of our volunteer translators, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

And finally, we were able to coordinate — for the first time — a virtual May Day event that spanned the globe.

This online event exceeded all our expectations.  We were able to show nearly 200 videos over the course of 11 hours.  Those videos varied in quality, as we expected, but many were outstanding and we shared these after May Day on our website and across social media.

Our audience came from all over the world and the feedback in the comments on Facebook was exceptionally positive.  Many trade unionists saw this as a unique opportunity to make contact with friends they don’t normally get the chance to see, and to greet one another over huge distances.

Over 100,000 trade unionists participated in the event online.

Looking back at 2020, it was a terrible year for everyone, and especially for working people.

But unions rose to meet the challenge by organising, fighting and resisting.

And LabourStart has been there to help.

Next year can only be better and we hope to fill our website with stories of working people winning the fight for social justice, strengthening our unions, and building back better.

I wish you and your families a happy New Year.

 

Solidarity forever!

 

Eric Lee

 

P.S. Please share this message with your friends, family and fellow union members.

Written by derek in: Uncategorized |
Dec
28
2020
0

A busy end to 2020 at LabourStart

At the end of each year, we write to all our volunteer translators. Our message this year included this:

We’ve run 24 campaigns this year.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to your efforts, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

Your work is turning that commitment of ours into a reality.

We also write to all our volunteer correspondents. In this year’s message, we wrote:

According to our statistics, 111 of you posted 55,618 news stories to our site this year. That’s average of 155 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news. Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news. Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

This is entirely due to your efforts — and to your understanding of our movement and the challenges we face, in your country and all over the world.

In the last two weeks, despite the holiday season, we’ve been busy as usual.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Ukrainian workers who have gone without pay for the last three years. The campaign is backed by the Ukrainian union PROFBUD and BWI. Today it already has nearly 4,000 supporters, and appears in 9 languages with more coming.

Our home page: This is now working in Russian and Ukrainian, showing our current campaigns. The ‘more campaigns’ link now works for all languages, which are showing only the most recent active campaigns. All links on the home page that pointed to insecure (http) links now point to secure (https) versions of the same page. We’ve been going through our home pages in all languages trying to make certain that all signup links to our mailing list now point to Mailchimp and not Sendy.

Reviving dormant languages: We wrote to volunteer translators for Finnish and Polish, and are following up also with Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese as well. All of these languages have had volunteer translators in the past, and if we can revive them all, our campaigns will reach much larger audiences.

Outreach: We wrote to a large number if Indian and Pakistani mine workers’ unions, and also reached out to the person who controls the ‘India labour news’ page on Facebook, in the hope of growing LabourStart’s presence in the region.

Bookshop: We’ve added many more titles to our US and UK bookshops on bookshop.org, and are planning to hold live author events on Zoom next month. In December, the US bookshop had 241 views and the UK one had 384 views and two sales.

Correspondents’ webinar: Our first-ever online meeting with correspondents was a success, with 35 participants.

LinkedIn: We now have a page in addition to our long-standing group. It has 33 followers. The group has grown to 2,250.

Resistance: This is the working title of the next collection of essays by Dan Gallin which we will be publishing in the next few weeks. Work on this has now resumed.

Dec
14
2020
0

Victories in Belarus, Colombia; new campaigns in Brazil, Kyrgyzstan; webinars; and we have a bookshop!

Apologies once again as this update has been delayed by a couple of weeks. It’s been a very busy month and here are some highlights:

Belarus: We shared the good news of the release of the jailed trade unionists (pictured) widely across social media and closed our campaign.

Brazil: We launched a campaign demanding an end the anti-union attacks in the city of São Paulo. After one month online, the campaign has 6,198 supporters.

Cambodia: We closed our current campaign after three months. We don’t know the result yet as we have not yet heard back from the sponsoring unions – ITUC and EI.

Canada: We invited our list to view the CLIFF videos — one of which received a LabourStart prize.

Colombia: We won a big victory in the ‘death shifts’ campaign and publicised this widely.(Pictured – right.)

India: We are in discussions with a colleague who had been an active LabourStart correspondent about ramping up our activities by working together on an Indian labour news page on Facebook which he founded, and that already has tens of thousands of supporters.

Iran: We raised the question of a campaign in support of a workers’ rights activists who received 74 lashes — but have not yet heard back from our global union partner.

Kyrgyzstan: We launched a major new campaign, and now have nearly 6,000 supporters. The campaign has benefitted from repeated posts across social media, and the GUF partners all posting news stories on their home pages about this.

Philippines: We gave a lot of publicity to the global unions’ “Workers’ Quest for Justice – an international webinar on human rights and the labour movement” which took place on 23 November.

UK: I gave a talk (via Zoom) to a London branch of Unite the Union. The subject was LabourStart; the branch has made a donation to us.


Books: We have launched — just in time for Christmas — online bookshops in cooperation with bookshop.org in the USA and UK.

Correspondents: We cleared the backlog of new correspondent applications. At the moment, we have 1,007 correspondents, the majority of whom are inactive. Of those, 64 joined us in 2020. (See ‘webinars’ below.)

Internationalisation: We’re checking all our home pages in various languages to try to standardise features and have completed this for the Dutch page.

Interns: In addition to our two current interns in the USA, Nate and Hargun, we have agreed with the Global Labour University (based in Germany) to take on one or two more for a 6-week period starting in mid-February. We have already interviewed the first one, a young Israeli trade unionist.

Labour Newswire: Our language-based newswires have been broken for some time, but we finally managed to find the problem and fixed the Russian and Spanish ones. We can now begin to publicise these again. We purged the Labour Newswire Global Network page of the many websites which no longer use our newswires (or which have gone defunct).

Site security: Due to changes made by our Internet host (IONOS), we were compelled to close our CloudFlare account and instead have bought into IONOS’ system, SiteLock. We needed to work with IONOS tech support to get this all to work properly. We are working to ensure that all pages on our site are now SSL-protected and no longer trigger warning messages in browsers.

Social media: In addition to our LinkedIn group, we now have a LinkedIn page which we are starting to recruit to.

Webinars: We are today holding our first-ever Zoom webinar, for LabourStart correspondents. Over 50 people have registered to attend. We plan to hold many more webinars to support our campaigns, etc. We are hoping to hold another public webinar in support of FLOC in the US, with the support of the IUF, but are waiting.

Dec
06
2020
0

LabourStart in Numbers: 1 November versus 1 October 2020

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in Italics.  Lists or accounts experiencing significant growth are in bold.

 

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74224 – 73,959

French: 7,622 – 7,659

German: 5797 – 5,812

Spanish: 5098 – 5,106

Turkish: 4,274

Korean: 3,317

Italian: 3289 – 3,310

Russian: 2671 – 2,637

Norwegian: 2261 – 2,260

Dutch: 1437 – 1,442

 

The others:

Arabic:  736

Belarusian:  287 – 257

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 972 – 980

Creole:  11

Czech: 64 – 65

Danish: 101

Esperanto: 161 – 159

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  516

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  240 – 241

Hindi:  35

Hungarian:  193 – 192

Indonesian:  432

Japanese: 404

Polish: 862

Portuguese: 1304 – 1,289

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 1018 – 1,026

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306 – 304

Vietnamese:  24

LabourStart Correspondents:  641 – 635

LabourStart Translators:  72 – 73

 

Flickr:

833 – 834 members.  10279 – 10,267 photos.

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13445- 13,416

LabourStart.org page follows: 14273 – 14,208

Global Labour News and Information: 8869 – 8,869

LabourStart UK:  2068 – 2072

LabourStart Franco: 589 – 590

LabourStart Brasil:  509 – 507

LabourStart Turkce:  2209 – 2,184

LabourStart TV: 445 – 447

 

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2225 – 2204

 

Twitter:

The Global Portuguese-language account received a bit of attention this month in anticipation of the Brazilian campaign that we launched in late November.  No other concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Global English: 26309 – 26,235

Canada English: 14669 – 14,470

USA: 5628 – 5,623

Australia: 4945 – 4,962

Global Spanish: 4648 – 4,490

Portuguese: 4066 – 3,459

Canada French: 2271 – 2,767

Italian: 505 – 503 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 351 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 229 – 228 (last tweet 2018)

German: 126 (last tweet 2018)

Russian: 42 (last tweet November 2019)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Written by derek in: Uncategorized |

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