Inside LabourStart

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky, where our numbers continue to rise spectacularly despite no concerted effort being made to grow the accounts.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

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.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST THREE MONTHS:

The decline over the northern hemisphere’s summer months is seasonal.  We can expect to return to 100+ news items posted each day in September.

May: 3169 (102 per day)

June: 2943 (98 per day)

July:  2674 (86 per day)

August:  2221 (72 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 87853-87036

French: 7198-7187

Spanish: 5666-5651

German: 5640-5575

Turkish: 4974-4685

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2845

 Russian: 2682

Norwegian: 2040-2036

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1588-1587

The others:

Arabic:  768

Azerbaijani:  56

Belarusian:  299

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 978-971

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 194-191

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  442-439

Georgian:  218-181

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  262

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  176-174

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 388

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 971-964

Portuguese: 1279-1276

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  119-97

Sinhalese: 19-1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 911-909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  146-142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  22-21

Internal:

Executive:  11-12

Interns and Past Interns:  16

LabourStart ACTIVE Correspondents: 644-628

LabourStart INACTIVE Correspondents:  853

LabourStart Translators:  109

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  972-961

BLUESKY:

No efforts were made to increase the number of followers for either account.  Despite this the global feed has more than doubled in the last four months.

Global:  42282-17557

 Canada English-language:  496-456

FLICKR:

Members:  837

Photos:  10383-10395

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  121-131

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9284-9220

LabourStart UK likes:  2k-2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV followers: 456

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 229

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2640

Page: 550-503

PODCASTS:

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the five (5) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 683-676 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 537-526 downloads: Interview with Paul Finch, President of the British Columbia General Employees Union (BCGEU) in Canada.
3. 514-494 downloads: USA: Interview with Shawna Bader-Blau from the Solidarity Center.
4. 480-452 downloads: Gen-Secs of two global union federations — Ambet Yuson from Building and Wood Workers’ International (BWI) and David Edwards from the Education International (EI) re. being blocked from entering Palestine.
5. 452-449 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 35107-35546

Canada English: 19958-20327

Global Portuguese: 9532-9698

Global Spanish: 9986-10109

Australia: 9005-9207

USA: 4448-4565

Canada French: 3014-3051

Russian: 47-50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 472 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 205 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28 Placeholder and not yet active

Podcasts: We have revived our podcasts.  We released three podcasts in August so far and expect to do several more — we have been in touch with trade union leaders in Africa and Asia, arranging interviews.  All our podcasts are here.

Campaigns: Our Taiwan campaign has 3,022 supporters and appears in 13 languages.  We are hoping to grow this, especially in the Chinese and Tagalog versions.  We have already heard that the employer has been receiving our messages and is complaining to the union about this.  Good.

Climate crisis: We are getting more involved in this, including planning to do some work around COP31 and the People’s Climate Summit in Turkey in November.  In the run-up to that, we have begun tagging news stories on LabourStart as being relevant to the climate crisis and will soon be able to show a page, updated regularly, of these stories.  More details coming soon.

Canadian news page: The French version had a problem with outputting province names in French — this has now been fixed.

Global solidarity conference: We continue to discuss this with potential partners in three countries.  Nothing has been finalised yet.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 984 in the first 14 days of August.  This is a time when many unions take a holiday and union websites often feature very little news — so getting an average of over 70 stories a day is excellent work by our volunteers.