Inside LabourStart

Here’s a snapshot of how our campaigns are doing – the number in brackets is where stood 8 days ago, when I last reported to you:

France: Rail unions fight against privatisation – 7,141 [7,124]
Norway: Sekkingstad and Sund, stop union busting! – 6,869 [3,966]
USA: Time for Wendt to negotiate with the union – 6,717 [6,698]
Turkey: After nearly a year on the picket lines, it’s time for DPDHL to negotiate with the union – 6,714 [6,680]
Russia: Union-busting at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology – 5,996 [-]
Korea: Oracle workers on strike – 5,878 [5,722]
XPO: Time to talk about your behaviour – 5,503 [5,452]
Australia: Exxon Mobil – time for a fair deal for your workers – 5,155 [5,063]
Shell – Stop cheating contract workers! – 3,515 [3,065]
Canada: Solidarity With Women Striking for a Living Wage! – 1,884 [1,740]

The Norway campaign seems poised to become our largest current campaign very soon. The Russia campaign picked up just under 6,000 supporters in one week, so it’s also doing quite well. The Shell campaign is continuing to run in English only, and for slightly longer than planned, and has picked up 450 new supporters in its “overtime” run.

In other news …

Brazil: UNI’s story demanding justice for Lula is shared widely on social networks.

Colombia: We shared the Education International’s story about repression of trade unionists widely on social networks.

New Zealand: We promote the strike by 30,000 widely on social networks.

Spain: We share the story of the Amazon workers strike widely on social networks.

Advertising: We haven’t paid for a Facebook ad for some time, so this week we did this to promote the new Russian campaign. So far we spent $70.51, our ad was shown to 11,389 people, and 113 seem to have clicked on it. Next time we’ll add our own code to see precisely how many people support a campaign due to advertising on Facebook.

Donations: Another Norwegian union makes a very generous donation to us. Another branch of Unite the Union in the UK also makes a donation. And we belatedly do the fundraising mailing to our German list — and get a substantial number of small donations as a result.

Events calendar: We fix the script to delete old events, which had not been working for some time.

Facebook group and page: We had quite a backlog of people asking to join the group; we’ve now mobilised more people to be admins so this should be resolved.  We add a couple more admins to the page as well, to ensure that we have fresh content all the time.

Mailing lists: We add 175 campaign supporters in 10 languages to the lists.

Tweeting our campaigns: We’ve had complaints that the Twitter link on our campaigns landing page wasn’t working; we did extensive testing on multiple browsers and operating systems and could not reproduce the problem.