Inside LabourStart

Having learned of the experiences of the BWI and Education International delegations that were denied access to Palestine (by the Israeli authorities), we reached out to the general secretaries, David Edwards and Ambet Yuson, who both agreed to be interviewed.  We interviewed them together and shared the recording widely — this became one our most popular podcasts, with more listeners even than our recent Minneapolis podcast.  Meanwhile, the Histadrut shared with us their statement on what happened, which we posted to our news page.

We continue our efforts to get more translators and correspondents, reviving our campaigns and mailing lists in languages which have gone dormant.  In the last two weeks, we reached out to our Polish and Romanian supporters, and managed to get a Polish mailing translated for the first time in a long time.  (Our Polish list is quite large – nearly 1,000 subscribers.)

Our mailing lists continue to grow, as we picked up 112 new subscribers during this period, despite not having launched a new campaign.

Coming soon: we will try to reinvigorate our Dutch language campaigns and mailing list this coming week — and probably Arabic the following week..  In another ten days or so, we’ll launch our May Day 2026 t-shirt fundraiser.

Campaigns: Our two new campaigns have taken off. The campaign in support of Malaysian workers making products for Apple has 4,465 supporters. Our campaign backing Turkish teachers had 3,537 supporters. Both can reach 5,000 supporters if we all push them to members of our unions.

Translators: Each week we’ve reached out to a different mailing list for a different language and each time, we’ve managed to recruit at least on new correspondent or translator to help revive LabourStart’s presence in that language. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve recruited new members of teams for Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Japanese and now — Korean.

Correspondents: In addition, we’ve recruited new correspondents in Germany and Nigeria.

Mailing lists: We’re testing a new signup form on our home page for people to join our mailing lists. Nearly everyone who does, does so by supporting one of our campaigns, but we’ve been asked to offer this option too. This week, we added 335 new subscribers to our lists, with large groups for the English and Turkish lists.

Donations: We received generous donations from BCGFEU (Canada) and IUF.

T-shirts: We’re getting ready to launch another t-shirt fundraising campaign, probably timed so people will have the shirts for May Day. We’ve just confirmed that the t-shirts are union-made. More details soon.

Small fixes: There had been a problem on our home page with the link for states and provinces; this is now fixed.