Inside LabourStart

This report covers the last two weeks — and we can start off with some very good news.

Our three-week long campaign in support of the workers at MetroWear in the Philippines, who make clothing for Lululemon, ended in a major victory. 3,933 people supported our campaign, which appeared in 12 languages, and we shared a detailed account, written by the union, of the victory widely on our news pages and by email to our list. A significant number of our supporters then made donations to LabourStart after the win.

We’re been struggling for some time to get regular, timely translations of our campaigns and mailings in French, but following an appeal to subscribers to our new Facebook channel, we’ve picked up two new volunteers who translated the Azerbaijan campaign and mailing. As a result, after just two days, that campaign had 437 more supporters.

That Facebook channel is also the reason why we just picked up seven new volunteer correspondents from the USA, Tunisia, Liberia, Panama, Belarus, New Zealand and Australia.

We did our first podcast interview for a while — this time with Shawna Bader-Blau, from the Solidarity Center. This had a considerably larger audience than most of our podcasts and was well received — though we did get a small number of hostile responses as well.

In a mailing to our Canadian supporters, we encouraged them to back a campaign launched by the Ontario Federation of Labour focussing on the struggle of Jay Naidoo, one of the most important figures in the South African labour movement, to remain in Canada.

Finally, we’ve embarked on major changes to both our campaigns and our newswires and expect to be able to announce significant improvements to both in coming days.