Inside LabourStart

The new campaign in support of the Turkish unions, launched just 50 hours ago, has already gotten 10,771 messages sent and currently appears in an unprecedented 23 languages.

We’ve had translations done by people who’ve never worked with us before into Hebrew, Arabic, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Dutch and Polish, in addition to 15 regular volunteer translators.

The campaign is currently growing at the rate of just about 200 per hour — something we’ve never seen before, not two days after launch.

We’ve done followup mailings to our English, French and Norwegian lists in the last 24 hours, plus two special mailings to the Canadian lists today.

This afternoon we’ve done large (>1K) mailings to the Italian and Russian lists, so combined with the second mailings to Norwegians, Francophones and Canadians this afternoon, we should continue to see substantial growth.

There’s also been an unprecedented push in social media, individual appeals to unions, and direct links made with mainstream journalists which may in the next few hours result in much greater publicity.

We have the full cooperation of the ITUC, British TUC, Amnesty International, some of the GUFs and our friends in Turkey, so it may be a while before the campaign begins to slow down.

For this to be our largest campaign ever, we need 6,443 more messages to be sent.  At the current rate (last two hours), we should break that record in 32 hours, or late tomorrow night …