Inside LabourStart

Lululemon – Philippines campaign: This campaign, launched a week ago, had 1,791 supporters; this is now up to 3,328 supporters, and the campaign appears in 9 languages.  A Tagalog version has been promised.  Because Lululemon is originally a Canadian company, we did a dedicated mailing earlier in the week to our Canadian subscribers, as well as a followup mailing to our English list yesterday.  We’ve already done two full rounds of publicity across all social networks including Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Blue Sky, WhatsApp and Telegram.

New campaigns: We had a good call with BWI earlier this week to discuss possible campaigns together.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted, 1,881 news stories in the first 19 days of June, just under 100 stories per day.

New correspondents: Thanks to our new ‘Inside LabourStart’ channel on Facebook (186 members), we’ve received 6 new correspondent applications this week – from Australia, Belarus, Liberia, New Zealand, Panama and Tunisia.

Podcasts: We promoted both of our recent interviews with Canadian labour leaders to our Canadian list.  And we scheduled our next podcast interview for next week – stay tuned!

Mailing lists: We added 188 new subscribers to our lists this week, most of them to the English list.

International strike report: We publicised this comprehensive study of strikes across 11 countries to the more than 80,000 people on our English list.  124 of them downloaded the report, and the webinar had about 15 participants.  These are poor results, and reflect a pattern:  People on our mailing list seem happy to sign up to support campaigns, but are less likely to download documents, buy stuff, or attend online events.

Svensson prize ceremony: We publicised the links to videos of this ceremony, which will help raise awareness about the struggle for free trade unions in Belarus.  This seems to have generated just 37 new views of the videos, while 730 of the subscribers clicked on the link to support the current campaign (see above).

International Union Rights: We sold 3 more subscriptions yesterday through the mailing to our English list.

Stop union busting at Lululemon in the Philippines: This campaign went live this week. As of this morning, it has 1,791 supporters.

International strike report: We’ve shared this report widely and have scheduled a public Zoom call to discuss it on Saturday.

New campaigns: We have a call scheduled with BWI to discuss possible new campaigns on Saudi Arabia and Panama.

Podcasts: We finally did the full publicity for the interview with Alberta’s trade union leader Gil McGowan. We also reached out to the Solidarity Center about an interview, which had been agreed in principle.

Facebook: Our “Inside LabourStart” Facebook channel now has 171 members; last week it had 41; our first post there was seen by 634 people.

As I was travelling for two weeks, this report covers a three-week period.

Germany: Postcards advertising LabourStart were printed and distributed by our friends at the teachers’ union GEW conference.

Panama: We reached out to BWI asking if they wanted help with a campaign on Panama.

Philippines: A campaign has been submitted and will go live shortly.

Turkey Telus / TikTok campaign: We are closing this down after 3 months. It was not a win for the workers, but the solidarity was important nonetheless.

USA: We had a Zoom call with staff at the Solidarity Center to discuss cooperation, including a Zoom interview with their director.

Research on strikes worldwide: We’ve teamed up with a group of researchers and activists from the Labour Studies Collective (Emek Çal??malar? Toplulu?u) in Turkey who’ve been compiling annual reports on strikes, including interviews with strikers. We’ll launch their latest report together next week, inviting our whole English list to attend.

Mailing lists: We’ve had ongoing issues with right-to-left languages (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew) and are once again setting up those lists with a separate (and free) service that can handle them.

Facebook Channel: We launched an “Inside LabourStart” channel which allows us to broadcast short messages. In the first 24 hours online, with no publicity, it already picked up 41 followers.

Global Solidarity in the Age of Trump: That was the title we gave to talk I presented at the Bread and Roses art gallery in Tel Aviv on 27 May. The event was organised by Ma’an, the independent trade union we have worked with before.

New correspondents: We added one each from Iran and Nigeria, and two more from the Asia Pacific region.