Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: I’ve done a mass mailing to our English list announcing the two new campaigns (Russia, El Salvador) and the release of Rosalba in Colombia (subject of a campaign of ours last winter). We also promoted Amnesty International’s Iran campaign, the ITUC annual survey, and a contest sponsored by UCS.  Last week we suggested a super-campaign to the ITUC based around their annual survey, but we’ve gotten no answer from them. We’ve gotten permission to close down the Chile campaign after 3 months and have asked permission to close down the Botswana one as the strike is now over.  Once again at the request of the RMT union we launched a UK-specific campaign and did a mailing to the more than 5,000 UK subscribers on our lists.  Nearly 700 messages have already been sent.

Conference: Work continues on the conference registration – I’ve gotten stuck on a bit of code and have been asking for help.  Made some progress today and hope to have this settled tomorrow so that we can begin registering people.  The problem has to do with the interaction between the Perl scripting language and a MySQL database.  I tested out Ustream, which integrates with Ning (UnionBook) as a way of doing video podcasts for the conference, but while it worked, the advertising was incredibly annoying, so I’ll be trying out different software instead.  Had a long Skype conference call with the Solidarity Center about the participation of Middle East and North African trade unionists at our event.

Fundraising: As the USA was lagging far behind other countries, I wrote to some of our friends in the American labour movement and have gotten some positive responses.  The total raised so far (including some money which has been pledged but not yet received) is £15,341 — a nearly 40% increase over last year.

UnionBook: I wrote to all UB members telling them how things were going with our drive to recruit new members – trying to reach a goal of 5,000 by 4 September.  While the site is growing, it’s not growing fast enough to meet that goal.  18 new members joined today, and another 18 yesterday.