Global Solidarity Conference 2023

With just 4 weeks to go, the number of people registering to attend the conference is growing by the hour.

Right now, we have 252 registrants from 66 countries, and of those 219 are from outside Georgia.

It’s possible that some of those people will not received visas or the financial support they need to come, but we can already see that this will be a large conference.

Plus we have new confirmed plenary speakers and workshops.

Belarus: We closed our current campaign as we are planning to launch a new one shortly.

This campaign had 8,134 supporters and appeared in 17 languages.

Our comrades remain in jail.

Israel: We gave extensive coverage to the unprecedented general strike in Israel this week.

And we have just learned that two representatives of the Histadrut will be coming to our conference as well.

I have been in Georgia now for 11 days and have met with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) who are our partners for the event, as well as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Solidarity Center, who are both providing generous assistance. We have 200 registrants at the moment — the number seems a bit lower than it was because we’ve actually had to remove quite a few duplicats, and a number of people registered but are not able to attend. The Georgian numbers are still quite low, but this will change as GTUC begins to invite its own members. We don’t have a proper agenda yet, but we have many workshop proposals and plenary speakers and an agreed timetable:

This will be a brief post as nearly all the work this week has focussed on our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference.  Some highlights:

The conference web page now appears in 4 languages – English, Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian.

As of this afternoon, there are 184 registrants from 59 countries — 155 of them from outside Georgia and 29 from Georgia.  We’ve picked up 42 new registrants this week. These numbers will grow in the next week, especially as we begin signing up Georgians in larger numbers.  We are also seeing more people volunteering to run workshops and speak at plenaries.  We hope to have a draft agenda ready in the next week or so.

On Sunday night, Eric Lee will travel to Georgia to spend two weeks working there.

We marked International Women’s Day with posts on social media and with our annual message to correspondents about how to tag stories so that they appear on our Working Women page, which was amended this year to feature Norwegian for the first time.

Meanwhile, our amazing volunteer correspondents continue to do great work sharing labour news from around the world.  They’ve posted 7,524 labour news stories since the start of the year.

More next week …

Global Solidarity Conference: This conference is continuing to attract new registrants and new ideas for content (workshops and plenary sessions). As of today, we have 142 people registered from 50 countries; of those 23 are from Georgia and 119 from abroad. We expect these numbers to grow siginificantly in the next few weeks. Eric will be in Georgia from 12 March for two weeks and will work closely with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to ensure the conference’s success.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign had 6,242 supporters last week; this has grown to 6,704. We are still missing translations into some key languages, including German and French.

Donations: The Norwegian union Industri Energi has made another very generous donation to LabourStart.

Campaigns: With the agreement of the union in Canada (ACTRA), we have closed down the campaign there.

Mailing lists: Boosted by the Poland IKEA campaign, we added 319 new subscribers to our lists this week — with 209 of those going to the English list and the Polish list growing by 67.

Programming: We continue to make small improvements to the functioning of LabourStart. On the page showing which correspondents have posted news today, we used to show only the total number for this month — now it’s also showing the total for the whole year so far.  In the first two months of 2023, our volunteer correspondents posted over 6,500 news stories.

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: 83432-83088

French: 7546

German: 5930

Spanish: 5538-5534

Turkish: 4412

Korean: 3320

Italian: 3100-3095

Russian: 2690

Norwegian: 2180-2171

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1527-1502

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 186

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  472

Georgian:  141

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  180

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 953-842

Portuguese: 1290

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  669

LabourStart Translators:  91-93

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10067-10060

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  124-122

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13764-13723

Global Labour News and Information: 8944-8940

LabourStart UK likes:  2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500

LabourStart Brasil:  552-553

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443

LabourStart TV follows:  454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Nepal:  7-6 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

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

Group: 2600

Page: 249-247

 

TWITTER:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts, with the exception of the Canada-French account.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually grow even without any interventon.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Mastodon).

 

Global English: 40479-40338

Canada English: 23493-23517

Global Portuguese: 11206

Global Spanish: 10645-10633

Australia: 10658-10667

USA: 5251-5261

Canada French: 3267-3047

Russian: 47

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

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

Swedish: 335 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (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): 22 Placeholder and not yet active.