Inside LabourStart

We missed last week’s update, so this report covers the last 14 days.

Campaigns: After a prolonged drought, we now have 4 live campaigns in support of workers in China, Eswatini, Georgia and Serbia. Here are the campaigns and their current total numbers of supporters:

• Georgia: Support striking workers at Evolution Gaming – 1,891
• Serbia: Yura must stop union-busting and negotiate – 2,326
• Eswatini: Recognise the teachers union, respect workers’ rights – 2,611
• China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now – 3,334

The translators have been very busy and most of the campaigns are appearing all the languages. There is a bit of a backlog as many of the translators don’t post the campaigns themselves, and as we transition to a new mailing list system (see below) only one of us is sending out the mailings at the moment.

Two of the campaigns were proposed by unions on the ground and we managed to get the support of European and global union federations.

Other campaigns are also in the pipeline.

In addition, we’ve discovered a new problem with our campaign submission form meaning that for the moment, we’re asking unions to manually submit their campaigns.

Also, the message appearing on our home page when there are no campaigns somehow continue to show for a few days even after campaigns began appearing there again — this has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: As a cost-cutting measure, we are moving from MailChimp to Mailjet, and have already begun doing mailings from the new system. We have migrated 27 of our lists and will migrate the remaining 14 lists this weekend, closing down the MailChimp account early next week. This should save LabourStart something on the order of £8,000 per year.

News: In the first 25 days of July, 38 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,505 news stories — this is a slight improvement compared to what I reported two weeks ago. The most active correspondents in July have been Derek, Patrick, Eric, Kyle and Pat. Next week we will be writing to all correspondents suggesting an online meetup to discuss what’s happening at LabourStart — and to offer help and support to those (the vast majority) who have not been posting news.

Campaigns: We launched our first new campaign since April – China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now. Two more campaigns are in the pipeline, in Serbia and Georgia, and we have reached out to help a union in Bangladesh as well.

Podcasts: We released another podcast this week — an interview with David Edwards, the general secretary of the Education International. Meanwhile, last week’s interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, has had more downloads than the previous six podcasts we released.

Mailing lists: After a series of false starts, we have started migrating our lists away from the very expensive MailChimp to MailJet, which we have used before. So far, the process seems relatively painless.  This should save us a considerable amount of money.

T-shirts: While we are unlikely to have t-shirts available in time for the Labour Day holiday in North America, we have made contact with a unionised workers’ coop in the US which can create an online store for us to sell not only t-shirts, but other union swag as well (hats, mugs, etc.) This could help us improve our finances in the future.

News: In the first 12 days of July, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,200 news stories — exactly 100 stories per day. The most active correspondents were Derek Blackadder, Eric Lee, Patrick Craven, Kyle Webster, and Pat Bulmer.

Podcasts: We’ve resumed our podcasts after a gap of about a month; two new interviews were recorded, one of which has now been posted. That interview, with Judith Kirton-Darling of IndustriAll Europe, is already our second most-popular podcast of the last three months after just one day online. We are waiting to hear back from three trade unionists who we invited for interviews.

Mailing lists: To cut our costs we have been looking into alternatives to the very expensive MailChimp. We will be testing using Mailjet again, at least for the English list.

Campaigns: We are likely to shortly resume campaigns following an email conversation with the International Federation of Journalists. We also offered campaigns to IUF, the Education International and IndustriAll Europe and are awaiting their response.

LabourStart Jobs: Canadian jobs continue to dominate this page, as very few correspondents have been posting any. We re-sent the mailing to all correspondents about this, which first went out in February.

Today in Labour History: For some time now we have had issues with updating records here — this is now well on the way to being fixed.

T-shirts: We have begun work on getting another batch of shirts printed and sold by a unionised place in the USA at a much lower cost than our previous efforts.

Books: A review of sales of books we print using Amazon KDP (including ebooks) shows that we sold about 6,500 of these in the last 12 years, earning over £3,000 for LabourStart. We have three new books in the pipeline and will ramp up efforts to get them all published this year. Our best-selling title is Solidarity: Selected Essays by Dan Gallin, which sold 1,045 copies.

Labour films: We are helping out a British trade unionist who has made a short film about workers on strike in the UK.

This month’s report does not contain any information regarding the mailing lists as we have changed the structure of the language segments and at the same are again in the process of changing service providers.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the last report. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report. (more…)