Inside LabourStart

Fundraising: As we do a couple of times a year, last week we sent out a fundraising appeal to our readers.  Nearly all the donations came in via PayPal and these totalled £2,796.73 so far.  As there were around 120 donors, the average donation was £23.30.  The appeal went out in ten languages – Belarusian, Chinese, English, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.  We’ll be following up today with the other languages, trying to get translations done.

Belarus: Support for the campaign has slowed down to a trickle, with just 17 new supporters this week, as we wait for the union to decide on next steps.

Poland: Solidarnosc reached out about a possible campaign and we are in discussions about it.

Ukraine: Following up on our recent campaign, we were contacted by a group of trade unionists who have doing solidarity work in a number of countries and who had launched their own campaign on change.org.  We had a Zoom call this week to discuss joint work in the future.

Telegram: Using all our social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) we reached out to encourage people to follow our public feed on Telegram, which had just 119 followers.  The result was a gain of just one new follower, which does say something about the limits of those social media accounts — and possibly how few trade unionists are using Telegram.