Inside LabourStart

Sorry to have missed a week, but here’s the news from LabourStart in the last two weeks (since 3 February):

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Solidarnosc in Poland – one of their leaders at IKEA has been illegally sacked by the company. This campaign took off very quickly, with over 3,200 supporters in less than 24 hours. It is our first campaign in a few months and it looks like our supporters are keen to help.

Old campaigns: We closed our Marlboro campaign in Turkey (with the permission of DISK). We’ve also closed two very old campaigns in Kazakhstan and Pakistan after several unsuccessful attempts to get news from the unions. In generals our campaigns run for three months, no more. We don’t want ‘stale’ campaigns that no one signs up for on our home page – it sends the wrong message to employers and governments.

Global Solidarity Conference: This is now exactly ten weeks (70 days) away. Over 100 people have already registered and we have a conference website which are updating every day. Please register there if you’ve not yet done so, and please share that link widely. Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, has agreed to speak at the conference.

Correspondents: We have an ongoing problem with people signing up to be correspondents, and then never posting news. Last week, we fixed a script which shows all new correspondents in the last two years and we identified 13 of them as having never posted a news story — and then wrote to all 13 of them. This will be done regularly. We should not give up on people who may simply not know how, or have forgotten how to login.

Donations: We received a generous donation from EPSU, PSI’s European region.  Donations from our supporters are not has high as we would have liked because the mass mailing asking for donations has only gone out to a small number of lists.   We don’t yet have translations yet for some of our major languages including French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Turkish.  All of those lists have 1,000 or more subscribers and it would be very helpful if we could get those translations done.

Canada: Pat Bulmer has replaced Derek Blackadder as our coordinator in Canada. Good luck, Pat and to Derek — thanks for decades of fantastic work there.