Inside LabourStart

Podcasts: We recorded a new one last week with Amalie from the Norwegian union Styrke who spoke with us about the Svensson Foundation international prize for trade union rights.  Today we’re interviewing Pawel Rudzki from the Netherlands, subject of a current LabourStart campaign.  And next week our intern Joanne is interviewing one of the Cornell ILR faculty.  So we’re managing to maintain our planned one podcast per week.

Publicising campaigns: In addition to all the other things we do when a campaign is launched, I have also begun devoting my fortnightly column for the British newspaper Solidarity to our current campaigns and sharing that widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 353 this week, the largest group coming into the Dutch language list.  This is due to the fact that the campaign in support of Pawel has now picked up 451 supporters for the Dutch-language version of our campaign.  This far exceeds the support we’re getting from local unions for our other campaigns, and is a very healthy development.

Adding news: There was a noticeable slow-down in how our system functioned last week, but this was fixed by shrinking the size of our news database.

“Which campaigns have I supported?”: We’ve located and will use again in all our regular mailings this wonderful little link that shows people which campaigns they’ve missed.  Look for it in our next mailing.

Donations: We received generous donations from the European Transport Workers Federation and UNIFOR in Canada, as well as from individuals last week.

Interns: Unfortunately, this year we will not receive interns from the Global Labour University as we have in previous years.

Correspondents: We picked up one new correspondent from Nigeria.

Turkey/Türkiye: We’ve made the switchover to Turkey’s new official name.  The hard part was ensuring that a search of our database using either spelling would show all news stories, and that has been tested and works well.

We launched a new campaign in the Netherlands at the request of FNV. It demands justice for union activist Pawel Rudzki and already has 2,392 supporters after just one day online.

In Guatemala, we’ve launched a new campaign at the request of PSI, demanding an end to the persecution of union leader Lesbia Xiomara Conde Pacheco.

We also reached out to the Starbucks workers union in the USA to offer our help with a campaign, but have not yet heard back.

On Thursday this week we had a meeting of LabourStart correspondents with participants from North America, South America, Europe, and Asia.

We signed up a new correspondent from Somalia this week.

Our country news pages have been improved and we will soon implement the same changes to our state/province pages.

We’ve had a handful of cases of duplicate posting of news stories. This should not happen and we think we know what went wrong.

Our next podcast interview, which should go live next week, will be about the Arthur Svensson prize for international trade union rights. Should be an interesting one.

Correspondents’ meeting: We’ve agreed a date and time for a meeting of LabourStart correspondents online, and all correspondents have been notified. If you are a LabourStart correspondent and did not hear from us, please email us ASAP.

Serbia campaign:

• Eric Lee’s article “Serbia: Echoes of Ronald Reagan as air traffic controllers come under attack” is published and shared widely.
• The message promoting the campaign went out to our Chinese, Hebrew and Hungarian lists this week.
• Support for the campaign grows, reaching 4,775 today, making it our second largest current campaign.

Mailing lists: Our lists continue to grow – we picked up 304 new subscribers this week, mostly for our English list.

Our home page: Our home page in more than 30 languages has now been significantly improved, as access to all news stories is now much easier than before (see the middle column.)