Inside LabourStart

Fundraising: Appeals have gone out to most of our lists and we are getting a good response both from individuals and some unions. According to PayPal, we have taken in £6,825.26 in the last 30 days, which is very good and most of that in the last 7 days. An additional £281.45 came in as bank transfers — we expect more, as quite a few requests for our bank details have come through, especially from Germany. In addition to raising more money, we are cutting costs. We will be migrating from MailChimp to another company, saving about 66% per month.

Interns: We have prepared a (partial) list of all our interns over the last decade or so, and will be reaching out to them. This is a group of talented, committed young people who have already worked with us and in some cases remain engaged already.

Programming:

• Another problem on our home page had been pointed out — when ‘all languages’ was selected for a country news page, it would only show the English story as the top story on the page. This has now been fixed.
• In addition, the home page in English has been tweaked to make the donation link more prominent and to remove the redundant link to our podcasts.
• We heard of a problem with the ‘today in labour history’ content which appears on the bottom of our country pages, but we cannot reproduce the problem.

Campaigns: Still no campaigns have been proposed to us. We looked into doing a campaign on Guatemala where a union leader has been killed and are waiting to hear back. This week, we also wrote to all LabourStart correspondents and translators asking for their help to find new campaigns for us.

News: In the first three weeks of June, 35 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,392 news stories — on average, 114 per day. This is an increase since last week.