Inside LabourStart

Most of the work in the last 13 days has focussed on campaigns:

• We launched a new campaign at the request of the ITF, in support of workers in Estonia.
• We’re keeping our Turkey/Mulberry campaign live at the moment at the request of IndustriALL pending some developments there.
• I wrote to Sharan Burrow at the ITUC offering our help in growing the joint campaign with the ILO “50 for Freedom”. She replied and is happy to have our help.
• We gave extensive publicity to the IUF’s new PepsiCo campaign on our home page, to our mailing lists, and on social media.
• We received a campaign request from WAC Ma’an in Israel; this is on hold pending developments in the region and we also await a reply from the Histadrut.
• We gave publicity to an IFJ campaign in support of kidnapped media workers in Yemen on social media.
• I completed work on the new Translations Dashboard which is being used by our volunteer translators. It shows who is translating our campaigns, and prevents duplication of effort.

In other news …

We now have confirmation that our next Global Solidarity Conference will take place in early May in Toronto. Details coming soon.

Our mailing lists grew by 317 in the last two weeks — 257 on the English list, 60 on the others.

I’ve now heard from three of the four organizations I wrote to about UnionBook; all three have declined the offer to adopt the site.

We have a number of new correspondents in the last two weeks from the ETUC in Brussels and unions in Ghana, Liberia and Nigeria.

Work has now begun on our Android app in French, thanks to Andy’s translation. There’s an issue with the English version that remains unresolved, so there’s some work to be done there. I’ve raised the question of an iOS app as a priority with one of our new working groups and look forward to hearing their views.