Inside LabourStart

It’s now been a week since we moved our campaigns over to the new environmentally-friendly server in Iceland. At the same time, we launched a major new campaign online (in support of Hava-Is, the Turkish aviation workers union). The good news is the dog that didn’t bark in the night: we had a total of zero (0) complaints from people that the link to the campaign did not work. We saw no noticeable freeze-up of the LabourStart site when a campaign went live. And 1&1 Internet will no longer threaten to shut us down every time we have a controversial campaign.

There are still many things that need to be fixed, but a lot of them were fixed this week. Most of the home pages now show current lists of all campaigns. Campaigns are showing totals of supporters (though this has to be better automated, and we should return to showing the totals for all languages). Latest news about the campaigns is still not working on the campaign page — though the ActNOW link is showing on the news pages. So, still some work to be done here.

We’ll be launching a new campaign today in support of oil workers in Iraq and have additional campaigns in the pipeline form Algeria, Korea and Kenya.

We also promoted a couple of campaigns (Thailand, Indonesia) which were not hosted on LabourStart; the Indonesian one resulted in a swift victory.

I had articles published in In These Times (USA), Our Times (Canada) and Tribune (UK) about the IUF’s recent “We are the 53 campaign” which won a sudden and very important victory last week. I was also interviewed for a new union solidarity initiative in North West England, for their newsletter.

Sydney conference: Andrew Casey was in London last week, so we had the chance to catch up and plan things. Andrew’s now using Basecamp, which is where we’re putting all the documents, discussion and so on regarding the conference. At the moment, things look good.