Oct
13
2015

Massacre in Ankara, and more

In the last 3 weeks …

Massacre in Ankara:

Upon hearing the news on Saturday morning from our comrades in DISK, we mobilized correspondents to post many news stories, to translate some of them from English, and to encourage global unions to issue statements, many of which have done so.

We made sure that social media highlighted our coverage of the massacre and the general strike which followed. We also gave a boost to the various GUF and ITUC statements.

We made the photo of the week, and the covers for our Facebook page and group, entirely black as a sign of our mourning for the deaths of so many our comrades.

And of course we indicated our willingness to launch a campaign if the Turkish or global unions wanted one.

Campaigns:

Eric and Gisela participated in the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung’s Berlin conference on the subject of transnational campaigns – full report below. We distributed many LabourStart flyers in English and German, and gave away 30 copies of our book about our campaign wins.

The workers at London’s National Gallery won a victory and we closed that campaign down.

Mulberry responded to our campaign, sending out a message to the thousands of supporters. IndustriALL wrote a response which we shared with our lists.

Though he’s not yet been released from prison, we closed down the Esmail Abdi campaign with the agreement of the Education International, after three months. There will almost certainly be follow-up campaigns for him and other prisoners in Iran.

We also closed down the BWI campaign in support of workers at SFI Malaysia after 3 months.

We also promoted a number of campaigns for fraternal organizations:

  • the IUF’s new PepsiSqueeze campaign,
  • the ITUC’s campaign in support of the ILO’s forced labour protocol,
  • the ITUC campaign on Mauritanian slaves in Saudi Arabia,
  • a BananaLink campaign in support of workers in Costa Rica
  • and an Australian campaign in support of workers in Queensland.

World Day for Decent Work (WDDW)

The World Day for Decent Work on 7 October was publicized on our social network pages and groups, as well as covered on our news pages.

On our social networks, we helped publicize the BWI Thunderclap for the WDDW.

Publicity and outreach

The Labor Day issue of Democratic Left, a US publication, ran an article of mine that was mostly about LabourStart – it’s here: http://www.ericlee.info/blog/?p=1090

Derek has been invited to speak at the congress of the Confederation of Canadian Unions, the smallest of the central labour bodies, in Vancouver in late October.

Eric participated in the recent AGM of the International Centre for Trade Union Rights, in London, and has been invited to participate in an event on labour history, representing LabourStart, at the International Insitute for Social History in Amsterdam in December.

Social networks

Our Twitter followers broke the 15,000 barrier early in October.  We are now up to 15,054 followers.  (Our Facebook page recently broke the 10,000 barrier as well; we have 10,134 likes there. )

Following a decision taken at the Strategic Retreat in Brussels, we offered UnionBook to a number of fraternal organizations; two turned us down, one is thinking about it, one hasn’t answered yet. Meanwhile, we’ve removed all references to LabourStart on the UnionBook home page.

ls-fbWe fixed how LabourStart stories are posted to Facebook, so that now we show a small graphic (there it is, over on the right), rather than letting Facebook arbitrarily choose an image that may have once been on our home page.

(For some reason, it had been showing an Israeli flag recently.)

Written by admin in: Campaigns,Publicity,Twitter,UnionBook |

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