Inside LabourStart

In the last 9 months, since I last did a regular update to this blog, our volunteer correspondents have posted a LOT of news stories.

Since the beginning of 2024, our correspondents have posted 14,227 stories — averaging 119 news stories per day.  That means that on average, a new labour news story appears on LabourStart every five minutes, 24 hours a day.

The majority of correspondents remain inactive.  In April, there were 47 active correspdents out of 1,084 — over 95% of the correspondents were inactive.

But we have begun regular mailings to the correspondents for whom we have current email addresses (a bit over 600 of them), and 8 of these mailings have gone out so far this year.  As a result, we’ve noted that a number of inactive correspondents have become active in recent weeks.

Since the beginning of August, when this blog was last updated (sorry!) we’ve run seven campaigns in support of workers and their unions, around the world.  These included campaigns in Central America, North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. There are several more in the pipeline.

Here’s the list:

Current campaigns:

– Egypt: Solidarity with Mahalla Textile Workers [11-Mar-2024] – CTUWS – 4,867 supporters
– Panama: Stop attacks on SUNTRACS [21-Dec-2023]  – BWI – 5,270 supporters
– Workers’ Rights, not for Sale! Rescind FSC certification in Military Junta-ruled Myanmar [19-Dec-2023] – BWI – 4,754 supporters

Closed campaigns:

– Québec: Support unions’ call for dialogue and negotiations [28-Nov-2023] – Education International and PSI – 5,095 supporters
– Serbia: Airline must stop union busting [02-Nov-2023] – ETF – 4,670 supporters
– Georgia: Reinstate sacked doctors who protested [11-Oct-2023] – EPSU – 5,785 supporters
– Iran: Free jailed teacher unionists now [14-Sep-2023]- Education International – 6,910 supporters

These campaigns are somewhat smaller than other recent campaigns and there are fewer of them, but we expect in 2024 to host more campaigns and working together with our global union partners, to involve more people in them.

In early February we began podcasting on LabourStart.  We were approached by people at the ‘Working Voices’ show, which airs on KPFK FM Los Angeles every Tuesday evening.  They asked us to make a weekly show.  We have done that every week, though not all our shows are picked up by ‘Working Voices’ for broadcast.

So far, we’ve done 13 interviews with trade union leaders and activists at global level and also in Australia, Belarus, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Iran, Israel / Palestine, Panama, the UK, Ukraine, and the USA.  Of the 13 interviews, six were with women, six were with men, and one was with a man and a woman.  We recorded two additional interviews this week, and have more scheduled for next week.

Listenership is growing week-on-week.  At the moment, the most popular show was our interview with Australia’s Sally McManus.

Two of the interviews were done by LabourStart Canada’s Pat Bulmer, the other 11 by Eric Lee (assisted on one of them by our intern, David).

If you have any ideas for interviews, please do pass them on.