Inside LabourStart

ILO: We gave extensive publicity on LabourStart’s home page and across social media to some key developments at the meeting of the ILO Governing Body last week — including the passage of a resolution on Ukraine and Russia, and the election of a new, union-backed Director General.

GLU conference: At the request of the Global Labour University we have helped to promote their annual conference with a mass mailing to our list. It appears that nearly 500 people from our list clicked through to learn more about or register for the conference.

Interns: Tomorrow marks the final day at work for our three interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair. We cannot thank them enough for all that they did during their time with us.

Donations: We received a generous donation from Industriall Europe.

T-shirts: We promoted the latest Working Class History t-shirt of the month across our social media accounts.

ITUC and ETUC leaders at a rally in solidarity with Ukraine.

Ukraine: LabourStart continues to be the main source of news on the trade union response to the war in Ukraine.

We had the opportunity in the last week to highlight statements from the Nordic trade unions, Solidarnosc (Poland) and KVPU (Ukraine) which criticised the continued membership of the pro-Putin Russian trade union centre FNPR in the ITUC.

We also shared today a long statement from the European Trade Union Confederation which also severely criticised FNPR.

Earlier, we published statements from two Russian national trade union centres, FNPR and KTR.

Jordan: Our planned webinar for last Friday (organised with the Education International) has been postponed. But EI remains interested in doing more webinars with us, so watch this space.

Donations: We’ve received a generous donation from BWI.

Coming up: In the next few weeks we will be holding our annual spring fundraiser and also preparing for a major online event to mark May Day – International Workers’ Day.

Elizabeth Tang from the IDWF.

International Women’s Day: Our webinar run jointly with the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF) was a success. About 300 people participated in the event on Zoom and Facebook. The event was recorded and we shared the link today (https://vimeo.com/686778630).

Jordan: Working together with the Education International, we will be hosting a webinar next Friday, 18.3 in English and Arabic. We will be reopening our campaign in support of the Jordanian Teachers’ Association which was suspended a while back.

UK: We were invited to speak to the London/South East TUC about LabourStart this week — and also got the chance to speak with a group of fisherman from Namibia who were on the call.

Donations: IndustriALL has made a very generous donation.

International Women’s Day: We agreed a day, time and topic for a global webinar organised with the International Domestic Workers Federation. We’ve done a lot of publicity on social media and mass mailings. IDWF is pulling together a fantastic panel. The event takes place on Tuesday, 8 March at 13:00. This is the URL to register to attend the event: http://www.labourstart.org/go/iwd2022

Lithuania: Our campaign continues to grow. We’re now at 5,563 supporters. The strike has been suspended due to the state of emergency in the country, but they have asked to continue promoting the campaign.   This week we did another mass mailing to our English list.

Ukraine: We continue posting lots of news from unions around the world about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Using our website and social media accounts we have promoted the ITUC appeal for donations too.

UK: Next week I’ve been invited to speak at an online event organised by trade unions in London and the South East of England on the subject of global solidarity and LabourStart.

USA: We’re helping the Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad, at their request, with weekly labour news bulletins, focussing mainly on US labour news.