Inside LabourStart

LabourStart’s Eric Lee with strikers at Evolution Gaming, in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Apologies for the late update of this blog; I was travelling in Georgia for most of this period.

During my time there I was able to meet three times with strikers at Evolution Gaming (see photo) where some 5,000 young workers have been on strike since mid-July. During one of those meetings, at a rally in front of the Evolution headquarters, I was asked to say a few words — part of the which the union shared online. We increased the number of sign-ups in the Georgian language and discussed next steps, including fund-raising to support the strikers.

While in Georgia, I also learned that an interview with me that took place a year ago appeared on the front page of the newspaper of the Ukrainian atomic workers union.

Marc Belanger has announced that Radio Labour’s International programme is shutting down after many years of great service to the international trade union movement. Our LabourStart podcasts can help take up the slack. As we reported a few weeks ago, our interview with trade unionists from Taiwan has become our most popular podcast so far, with just under 400 downloads. None of the other podcasts we’ve done have come even close to this.

I noticed that our Jobs page did not indicate how one submitted jobs to LabourStart. Now, on top of the page, it reads: “Want to post a job here? If you are a LabourStart volunteer correspondent, you can do this yourself. If you’re not a correspondent, email us at ericlee@labourstart.org.”

30 September was International Translation Day and I took the opportunity to write to all our translators, thanking them and telling them how important their work is.

And finally, a couple of the larger donations we were expecting came through — from the German education union GEW and from CUPE, the public sector union in Canada. We will need to do much more to restore LabourStart’s finances in the next few weeks and months.