Inside LabourStart

Fundraising: Appeals have gone out to most of our lists and we are getting a good response both from individuals and some unions. According to PayPal, we have taken in £6,825.26 in the last 30 days, which is very good and most of that in the last 7 days. An additional £281.45 came in as bank transfers — we expect more, as quite a few requests for our bank details have come through, especially from Germany. In addition to raising more money, we are cutting costs. We will be migrating from MailChimp to another company, saving about 66% per month.

Interns: We have prepared a (partial) list of all our interns over the last decade or so, and will be reaching out to them. This is a group of talented, committed young people who have already worked with us and in some cases remain engaged already.

Programming:

• Another problem on our home page had been pointed out — when ‘all languages’ was selected for a country news page, it would only show the English story as the top story on the page. This has now been fixed.
• In addition, the home page in English has been tweaked to make the donation link more prominent and to remove the redundant link to our podcasts.
• We heard of a problem with the ‘today in labour history’ content which appears on the bottom of our country pages, but we cannot reproduce the problem.

Campaigns: Still no campaigns have been proposed to us. We looked into doing a campaign on Guatemala where a union leader has been killed and are waiting to hear back. This week, we also wrote to all LabourStart correspondents and translators asking for their help to find new campaigns for us.

News: In the first three weeks of June, 35 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,392 news stories — on average, 114 per day. This is an increase since last week.

Fundraising: Facing a significant fall in our bank accounts, we put out a call for donations, including a mailing to our English list. In the last few days, we raised over £2,800 and are expecting more to come in. Comrades are encouraged to ask their unions to make donations if possible.

Programming: I looked into a complaint about the language selection drop-down menus, but could not reproduce the problem. Meanwhile, our pages showing state/province news have had a bug for years — clicking on ‘More news’ would show news from the country, not the state, and the display of the page was terrible (very small font, etc.) I have now fixed this.

Podcasts: I participated in the regular weekly online meeting of the Labor Podcasting and Radio Network, a US-based group. I learned that the numbers of downloads we are seeing is actually quite good, and will grow. I also learned that often the most successful interviews are with rank-and-file activists, and these sometimes draw larger audiences than those with high-ranking union leaders.

News: In the first two weeks of June, 32 of our volunteer correspondents were active, and they posted a total of 1,503 news stories — averaging 107 stories per day.

Campaigns: We continue to have no new campaigns listed on our home page. We have reached out to a number of unions, but so far nothing.

Campaigns: We now have no campaigns listed on our home page as we have now closed the Kenya and Myanmar campaigns.  Both ended with good results, as did the Egypt campaign which we closed last week.  We added new code to the home page to cope with this situation.  We continue to reach out to unions offering help, and today did a social media post across numerous platforms advertising our availability to help.

Fundraising:  Our appeal a week ago following the good news from Egypt generated just under £1,000 in individual donations.

Correspondents:  We wrote to 6 new correspondents (out of 16) who have not posted any news stories, asking if they need help.

Today in Labour History: We had a problem with one new correspondent not being able to login; this was now fixed.

We haven’t had a number report since November 2023.  With this post we’re returning to monthly reports.  This month’s report does not contain any new information regarding the mailing lists as we have changed the structure of the language segments and won’t report those numbers until next month.

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 November 2023. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 84014

French: 7642

German: 5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 3117

Russian: 2702

Norwegian: 2232

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1536

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 902

Creole:  11

Czech: 61

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 190

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  476

Georgian:  156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  186

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 970

Portuguese: 1292

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  677

LabourStart Translators:  97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 51

 

FLICKR:

Members:  839-840

Photos:  10212-10233 (after a culling of off-topic photos)

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  130-126

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.  Authority for the LabourStart Brasil page has been devolved to a volunteer in Brazil.

LabourStart.org page likes:  unavailable-14071

Global Labour News and Information: 9159-9094

LabourStart UK likes:  unavailable-2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443

LabourStart TV follows:  464-454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 173-17 (new)

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (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: 2622-2617

Page: 300-274

 

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. Mar 27, 2024. Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).  296 downloads.
2. April 11, 2024. Interview with Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood about the strike by Amazon workers in the UK.  273 downloads.
3. May 8, 2024.  Interview with Khaing Zar, trade union leader from Myanmar.

 

X (TWITTER as-was):

A few months ago the Portuguese, Spanish and Canada-EN accounts were  devolved to volunteers in Brazil, Spain and Canada.  As a result changes to tweet frequency and format have been introduced.  This may have had an effect on our numbers.

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  We will have to start again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Mastodon).

Global English: 38328-40123 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 3k followers last December]

Canada English: 22604-24923 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 2k followers last December]

Global Portuguese: 10413-10754

Global Spanish: 10517-10614

Australia: 10148-10342

USA: 5103-5133

Canada French: 3316-3325

Russian: 49-47

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (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): 28-27 Placeholder and not yet active.