Inside LabourStart

Belarus campaign: We have been informed that a new campaign will be launched shortly and we will then be able to close down our long-running current campaign, which has 10,210 supporters. It is currently our largest campaign.

Kazakhstan campaign: As our comrade Erzhan Elshibayev is still on trial, the unions have asked us to keep this long-running campaign live for a time, and we are doing so.

Myanmar campaign: The campaign has grown somewhat to 5,596 supporters and appears in nearly two dozen languages with more on the way.

Conference 2023: The first mailing (a simple ‘save the date’) went out on Thursday. Translators were sent the text today so the news can be shared much more widely. We are already seeing signs of interest in the conference.

Canadian campaigns: We have two campaigns running but growth has been hindered by the fact that following our transition from Mailchimp to Mailjet, our Canadian segment of the English mailing list has gotten much smaller. We are looking into way to fix this. Here are the two campaigns with the number of supporters –

• Canada: Union-busting Puts Public Safety at Risk! – 91
• Canada: End the Actors Lockout! – 803

Donations: September has, so far, been a good month for our fund-raising, as we took in £10,490.27.

The main news this week was the launch of our Myanmar campaign at the request of the global unions. IUF did a mailing to promote the campaign and BWI posted on their website about it. After just six days online, the campaign has 4,710 supporters and appears in 19 languages, with more on the way.

Many of those 4,710 people asked to be added to our mailing list, but nearly all of them were already subscribed. Our current subscribers are not sharing our campaigns with others in a big way, and without the active involvement of unions, the lists will not grow. We were unable to update the English list yet due to a problem with the file we submitted, but for the biggest six lists other than English, we only picked up 18 new subscribers this week.

We launched two new Canadian campaigns this week but ran into a couple of problems mailing to the Canadians on our English list. First and most important, the mailing was blocked. We have now figured out why, and the mailing went out successfully yesterday. The other problem is that Canadian segment is much smaller than we thought it would be, probably due to a problem when we exported our lists from Mailchimp to Mailjet a few months ago. We are investigating why that happened and will try to restore the list segment to its previous size.

Finally, we continued to raise more money this week, partly due to a mention of our needs in the mailings that went out to support the Myanmar campaign. Since I last reported, we have taken in £1,915.37 into our PayPal account, with other money also arriving as cheques and bank transfers. We are probably over £6,000 in donations since the beginning of September and we expect more to come through (including a substantial donation from a Canadian union).

Cihan Erdal: Good news – our comrade who had been jailed in Turkey and was the subject of a major LabourStart campaign is now back in Canada. We have shared this news very widely.

USA: We have reached out to unions which are organising workers at Amazon and Starbucks in the hope of helping them with LabourStart campaigns. We are hopeful that at least one of these
will result in a campaign shortly.

Polish campaign: Solidarnosc informed us that the campaign we were planning on is no longer needed, as the workers have won.  As we were informed, “the strike is over and the union leader is back to work.”

Myanmar campaign: We have a call today with BWI following a decision by the Council of Global Unions to revive the LabourStart campaign demanding recognition of the national unity government instead of the military dictatorship.

Fundraising: Last week I reported that we had raised just under £2,800. Today, that number is £3,709, a gain of about £910 this week. Mailings have yet to go out (not yet translated) into German, Russian, Ukrainian, Norwegian, Danish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Esperanto and other languages.  I appeal to comrades to help with these translations — thank you!

Fundraising: As we do a couple of times a year, last week we sent out a fundraising appeal to our readers.  Nearly all the donations came in via PayPal and these totalled £2,796.73 so far.  As there were around 120 donors, the average donation was £23.30.  The appeal went out in ten languages – Belarusian, Chinese, English, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.  We’ll be following up today with the other languages, trying to get translations done.

Belarus: Support for the campaign has slowed down to a trickle, with just 17 new supporters this week, as we wait for the union to decide on next steps.

Poland: Solidarnosc reached out about a possible campaign and we are in discussions about it.

Ukraine: Following up on our recent campaign, we were contacted by a group of trade unionists who have doing solidarity work in a number of countries and who had launched their own campaign on change.org.  We had a Zoom call this week to discuss joint work in the future.

Telegram: Using all our social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) we reached out to encourage people to follow our public feed on Telegram, which had just 119 followers.  The result was a gain of just one new follower, which does say something about the limits of those social media accounts — and possibly how few trade unionists are using Telegram.

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 which experienced growth are in bold.

 

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 74055-73493

French: 7483-7457

German: 5796

Spanish: 5498-5428

Turkish: 4169-4161

Korean: 3311-3308

Italian: 3088-3074

Russian: 2686-2668

Norwegian: 2140-2121

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1476

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 899

Creole:  11

Czech: 60-63

Danish: 92

Esperanto: 180-178

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  465

Georgian:  135

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293-289

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  178

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398-386

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 842-837

Portuguese: 1287

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 947

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 487-313

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  662

LabourStart Translators:  87

Africa Caucus:  63

 

Flickr:

Members:  837

Photos:  9885-10303 (cull of off-topic photos)

 

Telegram:

LabourStart channel:  120-122

 

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13577-13553

LabourStart.org page follows: 14499

Global Labour News and Information: 9025-9011

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable

LabourStart UK follows:  page unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart Brasil:  503-502

LabourStart Turkce:  2102-2101

LabourStart TV likes: 444-443

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2576-2559

Page: 209-188

 

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language, Australian, Global Portuguese-language and Global Spanish- feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

The Portuguese-language feed passed the 10,000 followers mark last month.  It is expected that the Spanish-language and Australian feeds will do so before the end of September.

 

Global English: 37743-36978

Canada English: 22073-21291

Portuguese: 10217-9606

Global Spanish: 9918-9097

Australia: 9362-9031

USA: 5441-5453

Canada French: 3113-3109

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335-337 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 226 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 21 NEW and not yet active.