Inside LabourStart

At the end of each year, we write to all our volunteer translators. Our message this year included this:

We’ve run 24 campaigns this year.

Some of these campaigns resulted in victories for the workers.

We’ve helped get trade unionists released from jail, companies to sit down and negotiate with workers’ representatives, and workers reinstated after being wrongfully sacked.

Thanks to your efforts, these campaigns often appear in many languages — and as a result are much larger and more effective than campaigns that appear only in English or a handful of major languages.

We are strong believers in linguistic diversity and equality, and we believe that workers everywhere should be encouraged to participate in global solidarity campaigns, regardless of what language they speak.

Your work is turning that commitment of ours into a reality.

We also write to all our volunteer correspondents. In this year’s message, we wrote:

According to our statistics, 111 of you posted 55,618 news stories to our site this year. That’s average of 155 news stories every day of the year.

A new labour news story every 9 minutes.

When I look at the mainstream media news sites, I barely see a hint of all this news. Working people and our unions rarely make headlines.

Even some union websites feature hardly any updated news. Some major union websites go weeks without a single update.

But not LabourStart.

If you don’t glance at our site for a week, you’ve missed 1,000 news stories.

This is entirely due to your efforts — and to your understanding of our movement and the challenges we face, in your country and all over the world.

In the last two weeks, despite the holiday season, we’ve been busy as usual.

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Ukrainian workers who have gone without pay for the last three years. The campaign is backed by the Ukrainian union PROFBUD and BWI. Today it already has nearly 4,000 supporters, and appears in 9 languages with more coming.

Our home page: This is now working in Russian and Ukrainian, showing our current campaigns. The ‘more campaigns’ link now works for all languages, which are showing only the most recent active campaigns. All links on the home page that pointed to insecure (http) links now point to secure (https) versions of the same page. We’ve been going through our home pages in all languages trying to make certain that all signup links to our mailing list now point to Mailchimp and not Sendy.

Reviving dormant languages: We wrote to volunteer translators for Finnish and Polish, and are following up also with Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese as well. All of these languages have had volunteer translators in the past, and if we can revive them all, our campaigns will reach much larger audiences.

Outreach: We wrote to a large number if Indian and Pakistani mine workers’ unions, and also reached out to the person who controls the ‘India labour news’ page on Facebook, in the hope of growing LabourStart’s presence in the region.

Bookshop: We’ve added many more titles to our US and UK bookshops on bookshop.org, and are planning to hold live author events on Zoom next month. In December, the US bookshop had 241 views and the UK one had 384 views and two sales.

Correspondents’ webinar: Our first-ever online meeting with correspondents was a success, with 35 participants.

LinkedIn: We now have a page in addition to our long-standing group. It has 33 followers. The group has grown to 2,250.

Resistance: This is the working title of the next collection of essays by Dan Gallin which we will be publishing in the next few weeks. Work on this has now resumed.