Jul
11
2013

The week in review – 6 – 11 July

Campaigns

At the request of the ITUC we launched a campaign in support of labour law reform in Bangladesh. It will not be live for very long. After 6 days online the campaign has 6,143 supporters in 8 languages.

We also turned our Canadian brewery campaign into a global one, and it now has 8,365 supporters in 3 languages. The IUF is supporting this one.

We’re going to launch two new campaigns (one is definite, one is a maybe) tomorrow — in support of Maruti Suzuki workers in India, and to protest the killing of a trade union leader in the Philippines. We’re working with the ITF and IndustriALL on this.

At the request of the IUF, we promoted their Mondelez Lebanon campaign to our English list and via social media. It shot up from 4,007 to 6,464 supporters in just two days.

In our campaigns, we added a new feature — a link to the Radio Labour report or interview linked to the campaign. You can see this on the right side of our campaigns pages.

And as “Select a country” had become one of our most popular countries for campaign supporters, I’ve now deleted this option which so many people were accepting as the default.

LabourStart books

We now have the beginnings of a rudimentary Publications page on our site, This will be tweaked and improved and probably moved off Inside LabourStart. We’ll be adding reviews as we find out about them.

I met with co-author Jeremy Green to make final plans for one of our next two books, about Firefox OS as a tool for social change. I’ve been writing a lot of text for it, and we hope to have it ready for sale by early September.

We’re still hoping to publish a selection of Dan Gallin’s writings as well, so 2013 should see at least 4 LabourStart books published.

Sales remain sluggish, with only 7 copies of the campaigning book and 11 copies of the global labour movement book sold by CreateSpace this month.

Fundraising

Our July 1st appeal to readers did not produce the results I’d hoped for, in part because it’s July, and in part because we allowed donations only in British pounds for the first few days.

That’s now been corrected and the donations page works in six popular currencies.

The total raised from the 19,962 campaign supporters so far has been £1,843.72.  This is less than half what we raised in April.

We received a donation from the Lipman-Miliband Trust (yes, that Miliband) and commitments from the IUF, Unite and the RMT.

Internationalization

We recruited 4 new Italian correspondents in an effort to revitalize our Italian news page, following a mailing to our entire Italian list about this.

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