Inside LabourStart

Despite the summer heat, the pandemic and lockdown, the last three weeks have been quite busy for us, with new campaigns — and a new intern.

New campaigns: We launched two new campaigns — for Zimbabwe and Turkey. The Turkey campaign, launched with in partnership with Deriteks and IndustriALL, appears in 14 languages and has 5,799 supporters. The Zimbabwe campaign, in partnership with Public Services International (PSI) and the Zimbabwean Nurses Association (ZINA) also appears in 14 languages and has 5,918 supporters. These campaigns appear alongside eight other active campaigns — the most campaigns we have ever run at the same time.

Our older campaigns: All have been given a boost by repeated posts across social media in the last couple of weeks.

Campaign translations: We did a comprehensive review and found that of the top 10 languages (other than English), we had complete sets of translations for just five campaigns. We followed up with key translators and activists about the other languages, but with limited success.  Our biggest problem is with Korean — we have a large mailing list, but no active volunteer translators.

Mailing lists: We imported 440 new subscribers who supported our campaigns, most of them to the English list.

Intern: LabourStart has now hired its sixth intern since October 2012 — Nathanael Cheng. Nate has just graduated from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, is currently based near Philadelphia in the US, and he began work for us during the last week of July.

The first volume, published in 2014.

Dan Gallin book: We’ve made a lot of progress on this book this month, and hope to have most of the work done in August. This is the second volume of essays; the first (Solidarity) we published in 2014.

Global Labour University: I met for an hour (online) with a dozen trade unionists from Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Liberia, Korea, India, Brazil, Germany, and Canada. We had a very good, productive conversation.

Our new home page: We’re rewritten some of the code for the Spanish page so that it will show many more news stories at the bottom of the page — and will consider doing the same for other languages as we roll these out. We also fixed a problem with top news stories not appearing on the bottom of the page in English and French editions. Because we have 10 active campaigns and on our new home page we show images for each campaign, this was taking up too much of the page (and pushing the news too far down). Instead we’re now limiting this to just the five latest campaigns. We’ll have a ‘more campaigns’ link in all languages, as we already do in English.

IONOS: Our web hosting company caused a major problem for us when they upgraded to a new version of Linux. No one could add news — as was reported by two of our more active correspondents in the UK. We managed to quickly fix the code which allows our software to keep running, but we will need to attentive in case anything else is broken too.