Inside LabourStart

This long-delayed report covers quite a bit of time — more than ten weeks. And it’s been a very busy ten weeks at that. This will be concise, but from next week I hope to resume regular weekly updates which can feature some more details. So here, basically, are the headlines since 10 May …

Campaigns: We launched quite a few, and even won some. These included campaigns in support of tobacco workers in the USA (in partnership with FLOC and the IUF), Thailand (with IndustriALL), Metro workers in Bucharest, Romania (with ETF and EPSU), Brazil, Colombia, and more. We also closed campaigns in Albania, India, Israel, Algeria and Ukraine. The last two were victories — our brother Mourad in Algeria was released from jail, and Profbud reached agreement with the employer in Ukraine. We’ve also had a partial win in Turkey, as Cihan has been released from jail but ordered to remain in the country to stand trial (that campaign continues).

Webinars: We held two excellent webinars in June, with several hundred participants. These focussed on Colombia and Brazil, and were closely tied to campaigns we launched in support of workers in both countries. Both the webinars and the campaigns have helped to raise the profile of our work in Latin America. We also reached out to the RWDSU in the USA to get a webinar going around the Amazon organising effort, but that seems to have stalled.

Publications: Dan Gallin’s new book Resistance was published and we’ve promoted it widely, including a limited time offer of free versions on Kindle. We have begun work on a 2022 Global Labour Calendar, our first in many years. We have also been working on a long-overdue edition of our Campaigning Online and Winning book.

Interns: The intern we were expecting to begin employing in mid-June was not available to us. Meanwhile, we are working on getting one or more interns from Canadian universities.

Fundraising: We did our annual appeal in mid-June, followed up by mailings about the release of Mourad and Cihan. We also did our first Facebook fundraiser, meeting our target this week. We’ve received generous donations in the last couple of months from IndustriALL, EPSU and ETF, and have reached out to other global unions and European federations. In addition, we have had tremendous support from a number of Canadian unions.

Outreach: We were approached by a team of academics in Canada who are doing “a research project which focuses on technology-driven innovation for the labour movement”. Eric had a two-hour interview with them, and Derek will soon be invited as well.

Fixes and changes to LabourStart: We are always making small changes, but in recent days have begun to attack a very long to-do list of suggested changes. We have now sorted out the country news pages for countries which have changed their names so that you will automatically see a link to the alternate name (e.g., Burma / Myanmar) — for the moment, this works only in English. We also fixed a problem with tweeting campaigns not in English and this seems to be working.

Blue skies: One project just beginning will be the tagging of news stories if these concern jobs in the labour movement. We often have such stories and we will find a way to show them in one place for people looking for such jobs — at no cost to the unions.