Inside LabourStart

Podcasts: We recorded a new one last week with Amalie from the Norwegian union Styrke who spoke with us about the Svensson Foundation international prize for trade union rights.  Today we’re interviewing Pawel Rudzki from the Netherlands, subject of a current LabourStart campaign.  And next week our intern Joanne is interviewing one of the Cornell ILR faculty.  So we’re managing to maintain our planned one podcast per week.

Publicising campaigns: In addition to all the other things we do when a campaign is launched, I have also begun devoting my fortnightly column for the British newspaper Solidarity to our current campaigns and sharing that widely.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 353 this week, the largest group coming into the Dutch language list.  This is due to the fact that the campaign in support of Pawel has now picked up 451 supporters for the Dutch-language version of our campaign.  This far exceeds the support we’re getting from local unions for our other campaigns, and is a very healthy development.

Adding news: There was a noticeable slow-down in how our system functioned last week, but this was fixed by shrinking the size of our news database.

“Which campaigns have I supported?”: We’ve located and will use again in all our regular mailings this wonderful little link that shows people which campaigns they’ve missed.  Look for it in our next mailing.

Donations: We received generous donations from the European Transport Workers Federation and UNIFOR in Canada, as well as from individuals last week.

Interns: Unfortunately, this year we will not receive interns from the Global Labour University as we have in previous years.

Correspondents: We picked up one new correspondent from Nigeria.

Turkey/Türkiye: We’ve made the switchover to Turkey’s new official name.  The hard part was ensuring that a search of our database using either spelling would show all news stories, and that has been tested and works well.