Due to some overseas travel and other issues, I’ve not been updating this blog — the last update was on 1 June.  So this will try to cover the last two months briefly.  I’ll try to keep the updates shorter and more frequent in future.

Campaigns:

• We just now launched a new campaign, together with PSI, in support of a jailed trade union leader in Mexico.  Translations are coming in and publicity happening.  After the first day, we have 2,750 supporters — a good start.
• We closed the Belarus and Georgia campaigns after three months.

Publicity:

• We’ve created the first version of a media list with a few dozen names.  All campaigns, events and conferences will now be sent to them.  Comrades with suggestions of who else should be on this list, please do let us know.
• We have reinvigorated our Instagram account (485 followers) and signed up for a Threads account.  We continue to grow our followings on Facebook, Twitter, Telegram, LinkedIn and Mastodon.
• We ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Microsoft in support of our Belarus campaign, but they produced very disappointing results.

Next book:

• Some of the participants in our recent Global Solidarity Conference have sent in texts of their presentations.  We have about 9,000 words and will probably post this online and perhaps as a print booklet as well.  The texts need to be edited.

Donations:

• We received a very generous donation from the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF) and another from NUPGE in Canada.  In September we will resume our fundraising efforts.

 

 

Advertising: We had ad campaigns on both Microsoft and Facebook but with disappointing results, so both have been suspended.  We need to have a re-think about how we promote our Belarus campaign more effectively.

Arabic: We’ve migrated our Arabic language mailing list from Mailjet to a different provider, as Mailjet handled right-to-left languages quite poorly.  And we did our first Arabic language mailing for a long time — in support of the Belarus campaign.  Thank you Assaf for the translation!

Cambodia: We shared Eric Lee’s article about the jailing of a woman trade union leader — but so far we have not been asked to help with a campaign (we did reach out).  The Australian Council of Trade Unions already has an online campaign going.  The article was also posted by the Svensson Foundation in Norway.

Campaigns – Belarus: The campaign is now in Arabic.  The campaign has now also been translated into Polish, but we are awaiting the translation of the mass mailing as well.

Campaigns – Georgia: The Wolt campaign is now in Polish.  Waiting for the mass mailing text to be translated.

Fundraising: The last translated fundraising mailings have now gone out — to our Portuguese, Hungarian and Polish lists.  So far, the mailing went out in 12 languages, but unfortunately it has not yet been translated into German.

Global Solidarity Conference: The Georgian Trade Union Confederation released an excellent video which we’ve shared widely. We also wrote to all the conference participants asking those who spoke in plenaries or workshops to share their texts for a possible book.  (If we don’t publish a book, we will find a way to share the texts online.)

News: As we reported today across social media, LabourStart shared 17,109 news stories in the first five months of 2023 — that’s an average of 3,421 per month, or over 113 per day.  Thank you to all our volunteer correspondents!

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of March (NB: WE HAVE MISSED TWO MONTHLY REPORTS).  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 83714-83432

French: 7586-7546

German: 5957-5930

Spanish: 5550-5538

Turkish: 4412

Korean: 3320

Italian: 3110-3100

Russian: 2702-2690

Norwegian: 2193-2180

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1534-1527

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  293-288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901

Creole:  11

Czech: 61-60

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 188-186

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  475-472

Georgian:  156-141

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  295-293

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  183-180

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 970-953

Portuguese: 1291-1290

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  669

LabourStart Translators:  91

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  839-838

Photos:  10211-10067

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  127-124

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.  Authority for the LabourStart Brasil page has been devolved to a volunteer in Brazil.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13836-13764

Global Labour News and Information: 8968-8944

LabourStart UK likes:  unavailable-2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: unavailable-500

LabourStart Brasil:  unavailable-552

LabourStart Turkce:  unavailable-2116

LabourStart TV likes: unavailable-443

LabourStart TV follows:  unavailable-454

LabourStart Vostok:  unavailable-119

LabourStart Esperanto:  unavailable-18

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2603-2600

Page: 263-249

 

TWITTER:

Since the last Numbers report the Portuguese, Spanish and Canada-EN accounts have been devolved to volunteers in Brazil, Spain and Canada.  As a result changes to tweet frequency and format have been introduced.  This may have had an effect on our numbers.

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Mastodon).

Global English: 40470-40479

Canada English: 23357-23493

Global Portuguese: 10986-11206

Global Spanish: 10738-10645

Australia: 10588-10658

USA: 5206-5251

Canada French: 3372-3267

Russian: 47

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 22 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

In the last week …

Belarus campaign: We’ve launched an ad campaign on Facebook following a small one on Microsoft (1,716 views of the ad, 15 clicks, no new supporters added). The Facebook ads, after two days online, were shown 9,833 times and 218 people clicked on them. The campaign currently has 6,475 supporters. So far, only one new supporter has been added through this advertising campaign. The campaign has now been translated into Arabic. Significant publicity was given to the campaign at this week’s ETUC congress in Berlin, but only a very small number of delegates there signed up to support it.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign has now been suspended after three months online.  We have not yet heard back from Solidarnosc on this.

The LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference is now behind us.  There’s a summary of what happened here.

In addition, in the last four weeks …

• Mailing lists: We’ve had problems with right-to-left languages using MailJet.  We’ve now tested Hebrew on a new service and it seems to work well.  We’ll migrate our Arabic and Farsi lists there soon.
• Finances: The conference cost us considerably more than we were planning (unexpected costs for hiring the hall, interpretation equipment rental, etc) and we did a successful emergency fundraiser to cover those costs.
• Advertising: To publicise our Belarus campaign we’ve started our first paid advertising campaign in a very long time.  We are initially using Microsoft, but have also applied to use Facebook again.  That campaign is now up to 6,420 but it could be much higher.
• Georgia campaign: Just before the conference opened we launched a campaign in support of Wolt workers in Georgia.  Today it has 5,080 supporters.
• Upcoming campaigns: We are expecting campaign proposals shortly from unions in Namibia and Israel.

 

 

 

With a lot going on, ironically, this will have to be a very short summary of everything that’s happened so far in April.

Global Solidarity Conference:  With just 7 days to go, we have a packed schedule and 404 registrants from 80 countries.  Not all of those people will come, as many are experiencing difficulties getting visas, while others registered thinking that this was to be an online conference.  Nevertheless, we expect hundreds of attendees.

New campaign – Belarus: To mark one year since the crackdown on unions by the regime, we have launched a major campaign with the support of the Belarusian unions and global unions too.  In the first 24 hours online, the campaign picked up over 2,000 supporters and many translations have come in.

New campaign – Georgia: On the same day, we launched a campaign in supporting of striking couriers in Georgia.  This campaign coincides with our conference in Tbilisi so we expect to be able to do some on-the-ground, face-to-face solidarity.

Please do what you can to share and promote those campaigns — and see you in Tbilisi!

Global Solidarity Conference 2023

With just 4 weeks to go, the number of people registering to attend the conference is growing by the hour.

Right now, we have 252 registrants from 66 countries, and of those 219 are from outside Georgia.

It’s possible that some of those people will not received visas or the financial support they need to come, but we can already see that this will be a large conference.

Plus we have new confirmed plenary speakers and workshops.

Belarus: We closed our current campaign as we are planning to launch a new one shortly.

This campaign had 8,134 supporters and appeared in 17 languages.

Our comrades remain in jail.

Israel: We gave extensive coverage to the unprecedented general strike in Israel this week.

And we have just learned that two representatives of the Histadrut will be coming to our conference as well.

I have been in Georgia now for 11 days and have met with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) who are our partners for the event, as well as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Solidarity Center, who are both providing generous assistance. We have 200 registrants at the moment — the number seems a bit lower than it was because we’ve actually had to remove quite a few duplicats, and a number of people registered but are not able to attend. The Georgian numbers are still quite low, but this will change as GTUC begins to invite its own members. We don’t have a proper agenda yet, but we have many workshop proposals and plenary speakers and an agreed timetable:

This will be a brief post as nearly all the work this week has focussed on our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference.  Some highlights:

The conference web page now appears in 4 languages – English, Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian.

As of this afternoon, there are 184 registrants from 59 countries — 155 of them from outside Georgia and 29 from Georgia.  We’ve picked up 42 new registrants this week. These numbers will grow in the next week, especially as we begin signing up Georgians in larger numbers.  We are also seeing more people volunteering to run workshops and speak at plenaries.  We hope to have a draft agenda ready in the next week or so.

On Sunday night, Eric Lee will travel to Georgia to spend two weeks working there.

We marked International Women’s Day with posts on social media and with our annual message to correspondents about how to tag stories so that they appear on our Working Women page, which was amended this year to feature Norwegian for the first time.

Meanwhile, our amazing volunteer correspondents continue to do great work sharing labour news from around the world.  They’ve posted 7,524 labour news stories since the start of the year.

More next week …

Global Solidarity Conference: This conference is continuing to attract new registrants and new ideas for content (workshops and plenary sessions). As of today, we have 142 people registered from 50 countries; of those 23 are from Georgia and 119 from abroad. We expect these numbers to grow siginificantly in the next few weeks. Eric will be in Georgia from 12 March for two weeks and will work closely with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to ensure the conference’s success.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign had 6,242 supporters last week; this has grown to 6,704. We are still missing translations into some key languages, including German and French.

Donations: The Norwegian union Industri Energi has made another very generous donation to LabourStart.

Campaigns: With the agreement of the union in Canada (ACTRA), we have closed down the campaign there.

Mailing lists: Boosted by the Poland IKEA campaign, we added 319 new subscribers to our lists this week — with 209 of those going to the English list and the Polish list growing by 67.

Programming: We continue to make small improvements to the functioning of LabourStart. On the page showing which correspondents have posted news today, we used to show only the total number for this month — now it’s also showing the total for the whole year so far.  In the first two months of 2023, our volunteer correspondents posted over 6,500 news stories.