Inside LabourStart

A colleague of ours, Walton Pantland (email: waltonp@gmail.com) who works for the British union UNITE, is doing research into how trade unions and their members are using new technologies for organising and has asked me to ask you to fill in his online survey.  You can also visit his CyberUnions blog here.

I’ve just sent out a special urgent action appeal to our list in English at the request of the IUF in support of this campaign.

Steve Jobs of Apple

This is starting to appear all over the net.

UPDATE: Fortune is now running with this story.  There’s also a version on PCPro, the website of a very important print magazine in the UK.  Versions are appearing in different languages including German, French, Italian and Chinese.

I first read about it on “App Advice” which wrote that “the conversation began with Jay’s forwarding of a LabourStart campaign email, which included the message” — and then goes on to quote our campaign.

They apparently picked up the story from “MacStories” — which actually includes a link to LabourStart in its article, as well a screen shot of our email message about the Foxconn campaign.

I wrote to Jobs myself yesterday, as did Derek Blackadder, and we’ll let you know here if he responds.

LabourStart has once again become a key source of breaking news as we gather trade union responses to the tragedy that took place yesterday.

We were the first website to report the reaction of Israeli unions.  We highlighted the response of the International Trade Union Confederation.  We’ve linked to reactions by the global union federations as they come in — including the IFJ and ITF.  We’ve reported on reactions by national trade union centers such as COSATU and the Canadian postal workers.  I encourage all correspondents to continue looking for union reactions and to post these with the names of both countries — Israel and Palestine.

I’ve done a few tweaks to the proposed agenda for our correspondents meeting in July at the end of LabourStart’s Global Solidarity Conference.  Please have a look and send me any changes you’d like made.  Thanks.

OK,  so it’s a first attempt and maybe the sound quality could be a little better, but please have a listen and let my know what you think — and share some tips about how to make it better.  Thanks.

Our new campaign is now live here:

http://www.labourstart.org/foxconn

I’ve done some basic publicity to our lists, via Facebook, UnionBook and Twitter, etc.

Please spread the word in your own organizations.

We’re currently talking with trade unionists in Hong Kong and Taiwan about launching a major online campaign to protest conditions at Foxconn, where the Apple iPad is being manufactured.  The suicides at this Taiwanese-owned factory are making top global news now, but efforts so far to organize a big online response have not been great.  I hope we have something up this weekend.

SNAPAP logo.

We were approached both by SNAPAP in Algeria (via Andy Funnel in France) and also by the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center — who are bringing over two Algerian trade unionists to our conference in Hamilton.

The campaign is now live, here.

The short URL is http://tinyurl.com/snapap