Inside LabourStart

Bluesky: Our brand-new account there [@labourstart.bsky.social] has picked up over 3,100 followers since our launch last week. We have posted 106 times to that list this week and are closely monitoring responses to the posts, also comparing this to our account on Twitter.

Mastodon: We have decided to stop posting to Mastodon and we will limit our social media presence to Facebook, X, Bluesky and LinkedIn only (for now).

Campaigns: We were given two new campaigns on the same day and are launching them over the course of the next several days. One involves the arrest of a trade union activist in Turkey and the other focusses on union-busting in Thailand. Translations are starting to go live today. Please do what you can to share these.

News: In the first three weeks of this month, 34 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,218 stories — more than 100 per day.

Campaigns: We’ve given our Georgia campaign a boost in a mass mailing; it is our smallest current campaign with just over 4,100 supporters. We’ve also helped to raise money for the strikers there via the UNI website, and we made a donation on behalf of LabourStart. We’ve been approached about possible campaigns this week in Turkey and Uganda. We also asked about a possible campaign on Iran.

Podcasts: We interviewed one of the Evolution Gaming strikers this week — our first podcast in several weeks.

Mailing lists: In the course of moving back and forth between systems, we lost the country names for a lot of subscribers. But now we’ve written software that reads through our campaign supporters database and updates our mailing list — and tested this on our Canadian supporters. It turns out the 20% of our mailing list are Canadians. This allows us to do targetted mailings based on country.  Our list has grown significantly as well with almost 6,000 new subscribers, all from Canada, being added. We will do this for other countries as well.

Mailings: We did three mailings to our English list this week, which is a lot for us. These included promotions for the winners of the LabourStart CLIFF video award, the Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights, and our latest podcast (see above).

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,432 news stories in the first 14 days of November, averaging over 100 per day. Unfortunately, only 32 correspondents were active during this period and we need to find way to reactivate the many inactive ones — and recruit new ones.

US elections: We’ve been posting every union statement we could find, mostly (but not only) from unions in the US.

Finances: We continue to receive generous donations from individual trade unionists as well as from their unions. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few weeks, but we’re not there yet.

We were delighted to hear from one union in Norway which decided to give us 1 NOK for every member of the member. Another union, in Germany, with two million members, just sent out their magazine to all of them including our appeal for funds and a link.

Arthur Svensson prize: Once again we’ve done a mass mailing to our list to promote the Arthur Svensson prize for international trade union rights. We hope that it will bring in many good nominees this year.

Country pages in French: It was pointed out to us that the Canada page in French still had a lot of residual English. We have now begun the process of fixing this. We will probably need to do this for other languages as well.

CLIFF: The LabourStart Executive watched candidate films and selected two as winners. Next week we’ll be informing our lists how they can view those films online.

Finances: Our appeals to our supporters have led to some very generous donations, both by individuals and unions. Our financial situation is still by no means secure, but it is considerably better than where it was in early September. We fixed the ‘Donate’ link on our home pages in all languages to offer more donation options in more currencies.  Among those unions which have made donations in the last couple of weeks were the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF), European Public Service Union (EPSU), Canadian Staff Union, and The Society (Canada).

Campaigns: We will shortly be closing our three oldest campaigns — from Eswatini, Serbia and Czechia. That will leave us with four active campaigns. Two weeks ago, I closed the China campaign (in support of jailed journalists).

CLIFF: LabourStart will shortly be announcing the recipient of an award we give out each year to a film shown as part of the Canadian Labour International Film Festival.

Podcasts: We interviewed an activist from the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, New York.