Inside LabourStart

We missed last week’s update, so this report covers the last 14 days.

Campaigns: After a prolonged drought, we now have 4 live campaigns in support of workers in China, Eswatini, Georgia and Serbia. Here are the campaigns and their current total numbers of supporters:

• Georgia: Support striking workers at Evolution Gaming – 1,891
• Serbia: Yura must stop union-busting and negotiate – 2,326
• Eswatini: Recognise the teachers union, respect workers’ rights – 2,611
• China: Release jailed journalists and media workers now – 3,334

The translators have been very busy and most of the campaigns are appearing all the languages. There is a bit of a backlog as many of the translators don’t post the campaigns themselves, and as we transition to a new mailing list system (see below) only one of us is sending out the mailings at the moment.

Two of the campaigns were proposed by unions on the ground and we managed to get the support of European and global union federations.

Other campaigns are also in the pipeline.

In addition, we’ve discovered a new problem with our campaign submission form meaning that for the moment, we’re asking unions to manually submit their campaigns.

Also, the message appearing on our home page when there are no campaigns somehow continue to show for a few days even after campaigns began appearing there again — this has now been fixed.

Mailing lists: As a cost-cutting measure, we are moving from MailChimp to Mailjet, and have already begun doing mailings from the new system. We have migrated 27 of our lists and will migrate the remaining 14 lists this weekend, closing down the MailChimp account early next week. This should save LabourStart something on the order of £8,000 per year.

News: In the first 25 days of July, 38 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,505 news stories — this is a slight improvement compared to what I reported two weeks ago. The most active correspondents in July have been Derek, Patrick, Eric, Kyle and Pat. Next week we will be writing to all correspondents suggesting an online meetup to discuss what’s happening at LabourStart — and to offer help and support to those (the vast majority) who have not been posting news.