Inside LabourStart

Summer is NOT a quiet time at LabourStart …

Campaigns:

• We launched our Gaza Ceasefire campaign on 22 July; it is already our second largest active campaign.
• We launched a campaign in defense of jailed Iranian trade unionist Reza Shahabi on 10 July.
• The Ecuador campaign was closed after 3 months.
• I’ve followed up with the translators for our top 15 languages, trying to make sure that as many campaigns as possible appear in as many languages as possible.
• We did very well with the recent Turkish Georg Fischer campaign and promoted news of our victory to our list, as did with the victory at LATAM in South America.  That’s two victories this month that we contributed to.
• Using a voucher we had from Google for some free advertising, we ran ads supporting out Polish LIDL campaign; they were seen by nearly 24,000 people, but only 103 clicked on the link.

Fund-raising:

• We received a generous donation from Building and Woodworkers International (BWI) and from the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD (TUAC).
• We’ve had an offer from a well-known comrade to run a Marathon in Wales in October to raise funds for LS; more details soon.

Events:

• Our under-utilized Events module just got better — now you can tag an event not only by country, but by state/province as well. You can see the results by checking out our UK/England news page.

News:

• People noticed that visiting our home page took you to a URL that included ‘2013’. This has now been fixed and instead of ‘2013’ it says ‘news’. Most people will not have noticed.

Office:

• I’ve been given warning that we’re to be kicked out of our offices very soon. I visited possible alternatives in Finsbury Park, Bethnal Green and Muswell Hill. I’m leaning towards working from home for a few months, which will save us several thousand pounds.

Speeches:

• LS has been invited to provide a speaker for a Unifor event in Canada.  Derek will probably do it.
• Eric has also been invited by the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI) to help teach a course in Germany in September.

New contacts:

• A comrade from a group in France called ReACT came to our offices for a meeting; we discussed many ways of cooperating.
• I had a long meeting in London with the Morocco-based representative of the Solidarity Center; we discussed among other things the possibility of a correspondents’ meeting in the region, maybe in Tunis.
• I followed up with all those who attended the IndustriALL communicators event last month in Italy, at which I spoke, and invited them to cooperate. Two replied, and we picked up a new correspondent in Cambodia as a result.

Books:

• I’ve been encouraging comrades to post reviews of the Dan Gallin book on Amazon; some have already done so.
• Even though book sales haven’t been amazing, for the first two months of our current financial year (June-July), book sales have made up about 10% of LabourStart’s income, though this is unlikely to continue.
• I’ve begun adding reviews to the Gallin book to our page promoting the book — so far, only two.
• I wrote to everyone who requested a review copy (PDF) and asked them to let me know when their reviews appear.
• Thanks to Matt Heaney, the book is now on sale at ver.di’s bookshop, both off- and online.
• I wrote to all 130 people who spoke at our Berlin conference reminding them that we want all their texts for our next book by the end of July.

Photo of the day:

• For those who post these photos (mostly Derek) there’s now an explanation of how to post country-specific ones. If anyone wants to do this, email me and I’ll explain how it’s done.
• The photo of the day is also now available on our mobile edition for the first time.

Enough for now … and now back to work …