Inside LabourStart

This month we’re promoting Paul Mason’s Live Working or Die Fighting: The Global Working Class.  Please spread the word in your unions.

We’ve gotten the green light to shut down two of our campaigns after more than three months online.

The Algeria campaign with 2,735 messages sent produced no results in the field (we are told).  The union is looking to get a new headquarters somewhere else.

The Foxconn campaign, with 5,484 supporters (yes, double the number of the Algeria campaign), contributed to a lot of publicity about the case and probably helped pressure Foxconn to raise wages.

Later today, we’ll have only 6 active campaigns.

I wonder if we shouldn’t begin to make as one of the criteria for our campaigns that there be some reasonable expectation that the campaign produce a result.  Not a guarantee, of course, but sometimes I think unions ask us to do campaigns because it’s just something on their to-do list to publicize a dispute, but the effort produces no result at all and no one ever expected it to do so.

This sounds harsh, but I wonder if we shouldn’t be thinking about it.

August is supposed to be a quiet month.  In Europe and elsewhere, schools are closed, trade union headquarters shut down, people go off on vacation.  I was even away for the first two weeks of the month.  And still LabourStart grew — with big gains for our mailing lists, increased traffic to the website, and the very rapid growth over just two weeks of the new version of UnionBook.

Here are the totals with the changes since the end of July in brackets:

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 68,857 [+1,023]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list: 57,950 [+167]
• Absolute unique visitors according to Google: 30,153 [+2,055]
• UnionBook – members: 4,959 [+180]
• UnionBook 2.0 – members: 1,192 [+1,192]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 3,612 [+100]
• Twitter – followers: 2,414 [+125]
• Correspondents: 803 [+6]
• Union group on Flickr: 564 [+2]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 199 [+9]

Some highlights from the mailing lists — the other large groups are:

• Norwegian 2,716 [+17]
• French 2,162 [+54]
• Spanish 1,209  [+21]
• German 798 [+3]
• Italian 518 [+3]
• Russian 441 [+12]
• Turkish 435 [+60]
• Polish 304 [+1]
• Portuguese 238 [+1]
• Dutch 230 [+5]
• Swedish 229 [+1]
• Chinese 181 [+12]
• Danish 162 [no change]

• My lastest podcast on labour and technology is now online, here.
• UnionBook 2.0 has 910 members as of this morning.
• I’ve asked about closing down our Algeria campaign and am waiting to hear from the comrades there.
• We’ve got a sponsor for our Canada page – ad to appear later today.
• Our book of the month for September will be this one (but don’t order it just yet – not using that link).
• Derek, Andrew and I have scheduled our first Skype conference call for next week to discuss the 2011 LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference.  Details coming soon.

No, these are not related.

Yesterday, I closed down the Taiwan YFO campaign which had been running for more than four months.  Today I’ll ask about shutting down the Algeria campaign which has now run for three months, and in another two days I’ll try to shut down the China Foxconn campaign, which will have been running for three months.  So by the weekend, we should be down to seven campaigns (down from ten) which is still quite a few.

At the same time, UnionBook is likely to reach 1,000 members by the weekend.  We picked up 409 new members on Tuesday and Wednesday and are about 140 short of the goal of 1,000.

We’re now well over 700 members.  I continue to process them one at a time.  There are 7 who are on hold as they have not given us the name of their union (some wrote ‘none’, others repeated their country name or workplace).  In all cases, I email them and ask what their connection is to the labour movement.  This morning alone I had to spend 40 minutes processing the members who came in overnight, so it might be getting close to time to share the admin chores here …

A week into the launch of the Ning-based version of UnionBook and I think it’s time to tell the 70,000 or so people on the LabourStart list.

At the moment we have 442 users on the new UnionBook; they have set up 32 groups, posted 242 photos and 29 videos, 13 events and 32 blog entries.

According to the ‘advanced search’, which can lag a week behind the actual data, here’s the breakdown by country (not a complete list):

1. USA 107
2. UK 89
3. Canada 74
4. Australia 41
5. Norway 17
6. Israel 11
7. Ireland 9
8. Belgium 8
9. Indonesia 6
10. New Zealand 6
11. Finland 6
12. France 5
13. Italy 3
14. Sweden 3
15. Switzerland 3
16. Germany 2
17. Spain 2
18. India 2
19. Brazil 1
20. Taiwan 1

It’s the largest strike in African history and we need to do all we can to ensure that LabourStart’s coverage is comprehensive and up-to-date.  Andrew and I have posted many articles so far, and today I’ll be writing to our key South African correspondents to ensure that they’re fully involved.  Meanwhile, using UnionBook, Facebook, Twitter and Linked in, I’ve drawn people’s attention to our South African news page.  This short URL is what we should promote: http://tinyurl.com/3a348wa

We’ve gone up from 45 members yesterday to 177 today.  And those members have invited another 343 to join.  And we still haven’t invited the nearly 5,000 people who currently use UnionBook, nor the LabourStart mailing lists (70,000).  All the feedback so far is positive, and the one big issue we need to resolve (waiting to hear from Ning support about this) is how members can configure their language.

Yesterday we had 7 members; today we have 45.  That followed a mass mailing to about 700 LabourStart correspondents (more than 5% of them signed up to the new UnionBook within 24 hours).  Those members have been sending out invitations, and there are now more than 70 invitees who may also be signing up.  Meanwhile, this morning I took a number of steps to to expand the membership of the new UnionBook:

1. Updated my Facebook status to encourage people to join
2. Sent out a message to the LabourStart group on Facebook (3,562 members)
3. Posted a tweet as LabourStart (2,363 followers)
4. Sent out a message to the UnionBook group on Facebook (707 members)
5. Sent out a message to the LabourStart group on LinkedIn (193 members)
6. Posted a site-wide message on UnionBook (old version)