May
07
2010

Eric Lee’s presentation to LaborComm 2010 – Ankara, Turkey

Here is the video and here is the text of my notes in English. (The Turkish language version is here.)

Networked union communications: The LabourStart experience

The Past

What is LabourStart?

The news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement, founded in 1998
Launched originally, by me, as a “portal” site – where trade unionists would start their day on the net.

From English to a multi-lingual system

For its first 4 years, site operated in English only; later we added Dutch and Norwegian versions.
Today LabourStart news works in 24 languages including Turkish.
The news is not translated – each of the sites is autonomous and relies upon volunteer correspondents.  (More on this later.)
6,000 spoken languages in the world today.  Many have millions of speakers (66 languages are spoken by at least 10 million people each).
But trade union websites including those of the global union federations generally ignore all but a handful.
Turkish, for example, is not found on most global union sites.

From promoting existing campaigns to creating our own

When we started – links to ICEM and other GUF-run campaigns; these were not very effective
Eventually, we wrote our own, multilingual software that is integrated with our news database and that is syndicated through RSS and other news feeds
We harvest the email addresses of those who sign up to our campaigns to create our mailing lists (more below)

The importance of experimentation

We’ve tried all kinds of things that didn’t necessarily work very well
For example:
Online chat
Discussion forums
A jobs board for jobs in the trade union movement
A branded web-based email tool
A “union browser” launched with Opera
We’ve learned what works and what doesn’t – but the important thing was to try
Unions don’t like to experiment, but we must

Building a new kind of network

LabourStart has grown to be much more than a list of links to labour news stories
The key is the building of a global network of trade union activists at every level of the unions

The Present

News

This remains our core activity – posting links to news stories about trade unions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in 24 languages
On average, we post 250 stories per day – 90,000 per year; that’s a lot of news about unions
These news links are posted by our network of 762 volunteer correspondents
You can see the top global stories, top stories by country, stories focussing on health and safety, stories about women workers.
You can search by company name, the entire archive is online.

Mailing lists

67,500 people currently on our lists
When I last saw Onder in 2002 it was 3,000 names
This is the only large-scale global network of trade unionists in existence.
English list is the largest with 56,000 names;
But Turkish list only has 61.
These lists – which we mail to 2-3 times per week – is more important than our website.
The mailings drive our campaigns.

Campaigns

We have had our own online campaign system since 2002, and have conducted many campaigns on behalf of unions.
A significant number of these have involved Turkey – including a current campaign in support of Seher Tümer, Branch Secretary of PSI affiliate SES (the trade union of public employees in health and social services) – with over 4,000 messages sent in 9 languages (but not Turkish) to the Turkish government.
Last July, we ran a campaign to protest the jailing of leaders of KESK.
A year ago, we ran an online campaign in support of the right of Turkish workers to demonstrate in Taksim square on May Day.
And 6 more campaigns in support of Turkish workers before that – in support of sacked metal workers, leather workers at DESA, another jailed woman leader of SES, jailed members of the road transport union, and strikers at Novamed, the first ever strike in a Turkish free trade zone back in 2006.
Some of our campaigns succeed, others fail.
Our campaigns are much larger today than they used to be but we need them to be in the Turkish language and to involve Turkish trade unionists in their thousands.

Radio LabourStart

Launched a few years ago as an actual Internet radio channel on Live365, this is now a page on LabourStart that lists on a daily basis radio broadcasts by trade unions – you can click and listen to them, but they are almost all in English.
We’re very excited by the launch of Radio Labour, initiated by Marc Belanger, formerly of the ILO workers’ education center in Turin.

LabourStart.tv

As with Radio LabourStart, LabourStart.tv consists of links to union videos available online, updated throughout the day.
This year we sponsored our first-ever global labour video of the year competition, and we cosponsor  online databases of labour films and labour film festivals.

Facebook

We have had a LabourStart group on the social networking site Facebook for several years; if you use Facebook you should sign up.
It currently has about 3,000 members.

Twitter

We were among the very first trade union groups to use the Twitter micro-blogging service which was initially quite appealing because it allowed us to send out SMS messages around the world for free.  This is no longer the case.
Still, we update it throughout the day – automatically – and we have over 2,000 followers.

UnionBook

UnionBook was created last year by LabourStart as a trade union alternative to Facebook.
Almost 5,000 trade unionists have opened accounts and have created hundreds of groups.
Unlike Facebook, UnionBook has no advertising.
It respects the privacy of its members.
And it will never throw someone out for using the site to organize workers or campaigns.
(Which has happened on Facebook.)

Upcoming global solidarity conference in July

Though LabourStart has had a number of small, invitation-only conferences in 2002, 2008 and 2009 in London and Washington, we’ve never before attempted to hold a public conference open to all trade unionist but are doing so this summer in Canada.
At the moment, no one from Turkey has registered to attend.

The Future

Worker-generated news

We’re hoping to link to more and more news created by workers and their unions and to rely less on mainstream media.
Workers should be encouraged and trained to create content online, and not only text but also audio and video.
When a strike or demonstration takes place, we’d like to be able to highlight the account given by workers who were there – in their own words.

The challenge of language

We need to move beyond global trade union websites that are only available in English, French, German and Spanish, such as the website of the ITUC which claims to represent 175 million workers in 155 countries.
The vast majority of them cannot read their website because it’s not in a language they understand.
We need to explore all the methods – such as using volunteer translators and machine translation – to involve millions more workers in our global movement.

Handheld devices – and Internet everywhere

The days when you accessed the Internet from your desktop PC in your office are rapidly ending – at least in the rich Western countries.
Two technologies are driving the change – first of all, the rise of small, handheld devices (smartphones, PDAs, tablet computers) and second, widespread wireless Internet.
This will drive changes in how we campaign, report news and communicate in the trade union movement.

Personalization

One-size-fits-all websites make no sense, but unions still use them.  Visit a good commercial site (like Amazon.com) and it recognizes you, knows what you like and are interested in, and gives you a customized, unique experience.
LabourStart has barely scratched the surface of this by recognizing you if you’ve signed up to a campaign and suggesting – based on your country – that you might be interested in news from that country.
We intend to do much more, and unions should also do much more.

Beyond the online network – taking solidarity into the real world

Finally, the whole point of doing all this work online is to make changes in the real world.
It’s all well and good to build an online network, but that network will be much more powerful and effective if it operates offline as well.
No strike will ever be won online; there is no substitute for a picket line or a street demonstration, or a well-organized trade union.
What we are doing is creating the conditions for the emergence of a new, networked global labour movement for the 21st century.
The new technology is making possible the realization of the dream of an international working class movement as proclaimed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels back in 1848 when they wrote the historic words, “Workers of all countries, unite!”

-end-

Written by ericlee in: Uncategorized |

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