Inside LabourStart

August is a month when many our readers go on holiday; some unions maintain only skeletal staffs.  The only comparable time of year is Christmas, when many union headquarters simply shut down for a week or two. As a result, our campaigns launched at this time of year tend to do rather poorly.

Of our 7 current campaigns, none have more than 6,700 supporters.  We usually have at least one with 10,000 or more, but that’s not the case in summer.

The most recent campaign on Ecuador, where the government is trying to break the teachers’ union, is a case in point.  This would normally be quite a large campaign, and we would expect many members of teachers’ unions to be signing up.  But this is not the case.  (And teachers often do get a summer break, which may explain why many of them are not online to respond to the appeal.)

I’d like your help to promote this campaign — which is available in 13 languages — and to help bring it up from its current 5,104 supporters to a more respectable number.  How do we do this?  Here are some ideas:

1. If you know anyone in the teachers’ union in your country or region, can you please write directly to them, sending a personal email encouraging them to get involved and sign up their members?
2. Can you share the campaign’s URL – http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=3156 – in an email message to your trade union contacts, including those who are not teachers?  This is a major violation of workers rights and should be the concern of workers everywhere.
3. If you have an account on Facebook, can you post that link, telling people that you supported this campaign and encouraging them to do the same?
4. If you are fluent in a language which is NOT one of the 13 this campaign appears in, can you help us translate the campaign and mass mailing?  We are missing translations, for example, into Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Japanese, Arabic and Chinese and yet we have mailing lists in those languages, with thousands of names of trade unionists who would support this campaign if they only knew about it.
5. Finally, can you print out the campaign page and a numbered list, and ask people at meetings if they would support the campaign?  If you get a list of people who support it, please send us their names and email addresses (ideally in a plain text file) and do indicate which language they speak, so we can add them to the correct mailing list.

Thanks very much!