Two campaigns to close today – and thoughts about expectations
We’ve gotten the green light to shut down two of our campaigns after more than three months online.
The Algeria campaign with 2,735 messages sent produced no results in the field (we are told). The union is looking to get a new headquarters somewhere else.
The Foxconn campaign, with 5,484 supporters (yes, double the number of the Algeria campaign), contributed to a lot of publicity about the case and probably helped pressure Foxconn to raise wages.
Later today, we’ll have only 6 active campaigns.
I wonder if we shouldn’t begin to make as one of the criteria for our campaigns that there be some reasonable expectation that the campaign produce a result. Not a guarantee, of course, but sometimes I think unions ask us to do campaigns because it’s just something on their to-do list to publicize a dispute, but the effort produces no result at all and no one ever expected it to do so.
This sounds harsh, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be thinking about it.
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I do not agree. There is NO WAY you can compare these two campaigns or their supposed results and deduce such a conclusion.
Before even starting, I wonder whether having so many campaigns online at once doesn’t contribute to a cannibalization factor, one campaign preventing another getting results. I have noticed that when we send a newsletter with several campaigns, the first gets a better result than the others. Has anyone else measured this?
The current results on the latest campaigns are as follows:
Cambodia 1763
Mexico Reinstatements 1942
Turkey UPS 2828
Irak 3489
Turkey Militants 1745
South Africa 1908
China Foxconn 5484
Algeria 2735
Considering the “hype” on the Turkish UPS campaign, the result of the Algerian one isn’t too bad. If we hadn’t messed up the efforts to get it online in Arabic, it might well have been better for all around (but that’s another story).
The result of the Foxconn campaign, launched in English, was obviously inflated by worldwide media attention, with extra episodes thanks to Steve Jobs bungling his communication, and the fact that it passed not only in the economic and labour news but also in the geek computer world. I, and no doubt others, posted to several magazine forums to publicize our campaign. And let’s not forget, there were suicides… It was about a favorite CSR subject in a country we love to criticize and hit hard on many sore points such as globalization. I’m not sure we can really appropriate ourselves such a big chunk of the relative success obtained. To my eyes, the workers don’t seem that much closer to having independent unions represent them which is the only common demand between the two campaigns.
The Algerian campaign originated in French, concerned a little-known Arab/Muslim country and “just” an independent union deprived of its HQ. It had nothing going for it! There was no media coverage outside of its frontiers that we didn’t create and our communication was, to say the least, summary. The Algerians who signed up had to read French (as I said before, we could have done better). 352 people signed up from the French campaign page against 310 for Foxconn. That’s respectively a 16% and 14% return on the French mailing list against 4% and 8% on the English list. How many people are “in the know” about the Algerian trade union movement? As for the results, we are told (by me) that the campaign produced none. I could have written several pages on the situation and the positive effects of our action but I didn’t think it would make the newsletter. I made it short, email style. But the thing is, if they didn’t get their HQ back, they are still at liberty to look for a new one. This might not have been the case without the campaign. Tensions were rising, two of their leaders nearly avoided arrest at a demonstration. They were shut down on extremely ambiguous pretexts (inviting unauthorized foreigners / organizing meetings between young men and young women – where can that go?) The government has cloned all the independent unions (outlawed in the private sector because UGTA has a monopole), setting up manned offices with the same names and well publicized phone numbers. But the tables are slowing turning, in the social unrest more and more people are turning towards the independent unions and supporting their creation in private companies. Let’s remember that in the 1990’s civil war, many trade unionists were assassinated as terrorists. Our campaign told the government not to cross the line, that we are watching… For me, that is result enough.
What I’m trying to say is that there is not one failure and one success as suggested but that the results are really quite balanced.
I don’t believe responsable unions would ask for a campaign just because it’s on a todo list. I can’t see how we can measure a “reasonable expectation that the campaign produce a result” nor define the notion of “result”. I think we must trust unions to consider all their options and measure for themselves what extra weight a LabourStart campaign can bring them. Of course, we might run into a rogue or fake union now and again.
As I wrote once before, the global union federations mostly have their own campaigning tools. As seen recently, one has even doubled us on a campaign already online. There is no point fighting for signatures or presenting petitions with the same names. We will be most effective bringing support to unions who do not have the networks, the know-how or the clout to organize an online campaign themselves. And if we (I) can bring the people on our mailing lists to say to themselves “Ah, there are unions in that country” and try to find out more, we (I) will have done “our (my) bit”.
There is one final aspect which is language. And that’s a whole new debate…
I obviously didn’t make myself clear — and I apologize for that. I wasn’t intending to compare these two campaigns. My observation was a more general one.
Many of our campaigns are launched at the requests of unions that lack campaigning tools, and that ask us to do this is in a very perfunctory way. I really do think in some cases it’s just something on someone’s todo list — or that a senior union official tells some underling to make sure LabourStart carries this too.
Once we launch the campaign, the union does absolutely nothing to promote it, we receive no updates, and are never told the results. This happens very often. Too often.
The Algeria campaign is EXACTLY the kind that we’re looking for, and it was never my intention to say otherwise.
That campaign focussed on a violation of workers’ rights in a country where the right to join and form independent trade unions is not to be taken for granted.
I am more concerned about cases where unions are in an ordinary industrial dispute with a local employer and ask for our help — and where the end result is that our campaign contributes nothing.
I agree fully with Andy that we cannot run too many campaigns at the same time, and have written before — and at length — on the subject of campaign fatigue.
One of the reasons why we are able to have this discussion at all is because I make a point of closing down campaigns after 3 months. I do this in part to make sure that we do not have a very long list of open, active campaigns.
Let me repeat what I said at the beginning: I was not contrasting the Foxconn and Algeria campaigns. I think each of these were worth doing. There are campaigns — including a couple of the active ones — that I think we should not have done. But I sometimes hesitate to take this on myself.
Perhaps what we need is a small group of people who are empowered to decide to say no to a union — maybe when I have my doubts about such a campaign, I could approach such a group and say, what do you think? And then if we reject it, it wouldn’t be my decision alone to do so.
I hope that’s made things a bit clearer.
Interesting, I just have no idea what kind of answers we’d get if we put that to the sponsoring unions.