Inside LabourStart

Campaigns closing: We were able to close down 4 campaigns in this period – Bahrain, Mexico, Colombia and Thailand. None of them, unfortunately, was a complete win for us. And none were record-breakers in terms of the number of supporters. The number of supporters ranged from 5,533 to 8,525.

New campaigns: Kazahkstan and Turkey launched just one day apart.

Upcoming campaigns: We are still waiting to hear from the Korean Metal Workers Union and IndustriALL about a Ssangyong campaign.

Campaign “contract”: We agreed a text that is now shown on the page where unions request campaigns that spells out what we will do and what the union will do. Let’s hope it makes things clearer and easier, and encourages unions to do more to build the campaigns.

Campaign “cookies”: We’re now compliant with the European Union directive on cookies, I think. (See full report below.)

Campaign translations: We’ve sorted out the problem of both Arabic and Turkey in the last week – thanks very much to Erin, Molly, Eyup and Mohamed.

Campaigns – new server: Still tweaking things that don’t work as before. The list of current campaigns now works in languages other than English. There’s a problem with permissions for the file listing email addresses – hopefully to be fixed this week. The “my campaigns” link in mailings should now work for most languages. The good news is that we’re not getting tons of complaints that the server isn’t responding, nor is a campaign launch causing the old LabourStart server (with our news) to freeze up as it sometimes would in the past. And we’re not getting any threats from 1&1 Internet to shut us down. So all in all, a successful transition to our new eco-friendly server in Iceland.

Articles: My article on the launch of IndustriALL has now appeared in Italian on the website of FIOM-CGIL. Another article on the same subject has been accepted for publication by Solidarity in the UK.

FAQ: I reviewed and updated the FAQ page on LabourStart.

Brochure: I’ve gotten details of many graphic designers and we’ll soon get this thing printed. It should help us with fundraising with unions.

Donations: A raffle held at the National Union of Workers Officials’ Conference in Australia raised A$1,000 for us – a wonderful example of grassroots activity that I hope others will follow.