Inside LabourStart

Because we’re very late with this report, it will be very brief — but should give you a good idea of what LabourStart has been up to in the last four months. Regular updates will resume from next week.

Campaigns

• We closed the IUF’s Cambodia Nagaworld campaign – it was a win.  We also closed the Lithuania and Colombia campaigns – which we could not declare as victories.
• We launched a campaign in support of Borjomi water workers in Georgia – and closed it after a couple of days – this was a big win for the workers.  Eric got to spend a day with the strikers during his visit to Georgia in May, where he also met with the Georgian union leadership.
• In early May, we launched a new campaign in support of jailed union leaders in Belarus – with the help of GLU students.  It is currently our largest campaign, with over 9,700 supporters.
• We also launched a new campaign on Iran, with the support of the IUF.
• And we also launched a campaign in support of a jailed trade unionist in Kazakhstan.
• We launched our first campaign in Armenian, now that the interface has been translated into that language.

Global Solidarity Conference 2023

Discussions begin with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation about holding a conference in Tbilisi in early 2023.

Fundraising

We sent out a fundraising appeal at the beginning of April. We raised over £2,000 in the first 24 hours, and more funds over the course of the following months.

Home page

Due to changes made by our web hosts, IONOS, many records became corrupted and character encoding on our home page broke on 1 July. Following that, we had problems with our jobs page, our photo of the week and our link to Radio Labour. Most of this has now been fixed, and work on this should be completed by 10 August.

Interns

Our three GLU interns finished their work at the end of March.  We were lucky to have Jessica, Malaika and Zubair working with us — albeit for just a few weeks — and thank them for their efforts.

Labour News Network

This was improved with a new banner and with several items posted to it.

Mailing lists

We migrated from Mailchimp to Mailjet in May, saving a lot of money.

May Day

• We organised a recorded May Day event with the participation of many trade unions from around the globe.
• There were 649 views of the video as of 2 May, and 500 more since then.
• We shared many of the individual videos across social media in May.

Social media

• A new Twitter account was created – https://twitter.com/LabourSouthAsia
• Our YouTube channel was revived to accommodate the May Day videos.

UK

• Invited by the TUC, Eric spoke with campaigns and communications staffers from several unions on a Zoom call.
• We participated for the first time in the Tolpuddle festival – Derek and Eric spoke in one session, LabourStart had a stall, we gave out hundreds of leaflets, and distributed some copies of our book on migrant workers.