Inside LabourStart

Victory in Egypt: We suspended our campaign in support of the Mahalla textile workers following receipt of the news that the two remaining jailed union activists have now been freed.

Zimbabwe: We were approached by a union whose leader has been jailed and we reached out to the Education International. We’re now having discussions with them about how we can help.

New campaigns: We have reached out to a number of unions as we are about to run out of live campaigns. There are several good prospects, though we may shortly face a situation where we have no current campaigns on our home page.  I will be tweaking our home page software to cope with that situation.

Podcasts: We didn’t release a new podcast this week, though we do have one that needs some editing and will be released shortly. We have a number of people to followup with to ensure that we continue released one new show each week.

News: In the first 30 days of May, our 44 active volunteer correspondents posted 3,525 news stories, an average of 117 per day. This is a big increase compared to a week ago, as we added nearly 1,000 stories this week. The top 5 correspondents who have posted the most news stories this month are (in order) Derek, Eric, Patrick, Pat and Espen.

Fixed bug: Previously, when looking at news from a particular country, if you selected ‘all languages’ it would only show English stories in the top 10, on the left side the page. I have now fixed this to work correctly.

Clicky: We briefly used this service to trace hits to our site, but have not done so for many years. Following reminders from the company, I have now removed all references to Click from our site.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Macarena Grimalt Fernandes from Argentina. In the first 24 hours online, this podcast already had nearly 120 downloads. The five most popular podcasts we’re done so far were: Khaing Zar (Myanmar), Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood (UK), Sally McManus (Australia), Carolina Dantas (Panama) and Olesia Briazgunova (Ukraine).

Reddit: We have begun sharing some campaigns and news on Reddit in addition to all the other social media platforms we use. These have been seen by, in some cases, many thousands of people; our first post had over 8,000 total views. For a number of reasons, our posts to Reddit are likely to have a wider reach than those to, for example, Twitter.

News: Our volunteer correspondents have posted 2,560 news stories in the first 23 days of May, averaging over 111 per day. This is, again, a small decrease compared to last week, but still a very large number of news stories.

Podcasts: We released our interview with Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), this week. It fairly quickly picked up over 100 downloads. The previous week’s interview, with Khaing Zar, now has over 220 downloads. We have one interview ready to go, and are trying to finalise interviews with trade unionists in Argentina, the US and Europe. We now have a prominent link to the podcasts on all our home pages, in all languages.

Kenya campaign: We’re slowly getting close to 3,000 supporters in what we hope will be the final days of this campaign, as the strike appears to be over. The union has asked us to keep it going a bit longer. The campaign is in 15 languages, and the ones with the largest numbers of supporters are (in order) English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian and Dutch.

New campaigns: We continue to reach out to unions that might need our help. This week, this included IF Metall in Sweden, where the Tesla strike continues, the independent trade unions of Belarus, and the Georgian Trade Union Confederation offering our help in supporting the pro-democracy protests.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,879 stories to LabourStart in the first 16 days of May, an average of more than 117 per day, a slight decrease compared to the previous week. This month, 36 of our correspondents have been active – we need to grow that.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation — that interview will go live next week. We released the interview we did with Myanmar trade union leader Khaing Zar and in its first day online, it soared to 139 downloads, well on its way to being one of our most popular podcasts.

Kenya campaign: The Kenya campaign, launched at the request of PSI, picked up more than 1,000 new supporters in the last week, and appears in 15 languages — a gain of 8 languages this week. The union has suspended the strike but we’ve been asked to keep the campaign live for a while longer.

Panama campaign: We closed this campaign after more than four months online — it had 5,282 supporters and appeared in 12 languages.

News: In the first 9 days of May, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,082 news stories, or 120 on average every day.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign in support of striking health care workers in Kenya.  It currently appears in 7 languages and has 1,338 supporters.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed a leader of the independent trade union movement in Myanmar — which will go live next week.  We released an interview with Jan Willem Goudriaan, general secretary of EPSU.

Iran: The workers’ rights NGO ‘Free Them Now’ released a video of LabourStart’s Eric Lee calling on the ILO to refuse to seat the Iranian ‘worker delegates’ at the International Labour Conference next month.

Egypt: We also prepared a video for the CTUWS at their request demanding on May Day the release of the jailed worker activists from Mahalla textiles.  It does not yet appear to be live on the net.

This blog: After about 8 months of silence, we resumed updating this blog, with several catch-up posts this week.

LabourStart has been lucky to have had some outstanding interns over the last decade or more, and for the last few months — starting in September 2023, we have had four exceptionally talented young people working with us.

David came to us through the Global Labour University (GLU); he is a labour lawyer from Colombia and was very helpful with many projects, including an upcoming campaign in the city of Medellin.

We had three interns from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) — Isabel, Erin and Salomée.  They all did excellent work on a number of projects as well as helping us with translations into Korean and French.

We will continue to work with GLU and the ILR school, as well as others, to help introduce a new generation of activists to the international trade union movement.

It’s May Day and we’d like to take this opportunity to express our solidarity with workers everywhere who are fighting for their rights, for equality, social justice and peace.

LabourStart today will be filled with news links from all around the world and we thank our volunteer correspondents for making that happen.

This year, we were approached by worker activists from Iran and Egypt, asking us for May Day video messages.

• The message for the Iranian group ‘Free Them Now’ is now online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2SW_sXC_Gw
• We are still waiting for the CTUWS in Egypt to send us the link to the video we gave to them.

A very happy May Day to all of you!