Inside LabourStart

I haven’t been updating this blog often enough — but LabourStart has been keeping us very busy these days …

Labour Video of the Year competition – voting began yesterday.  Over 800 votes cast in the first 24 hours.  Click here to watch the voting as it happens.

Global campaigns – We launched a campaign in support of Mexican miners last week.  3,112 supporters so far and the campaign is available in 7 languages.  Our campaign in support of imprisoned Turkish trade unionist Seher Tümer also has over 3,000 messages sent — in 7 languages as well.  The campaign we launched in support of hunger striking Irish workers ended with an agreement and was closed down within 6 days of launch. We will shortly be launching a campaign in support of workers in Guyana, at the request of the ICEM.

National campaigns – We have been asked both by the British TUC and the New Zealand union PSA to launch campaigns targetting only people in those countries.  The TUC campaign has been very slow to take off, but the New Zealand one has brought in well over 400 responses — adding many New Zealand trade unionists to our list. In addition, we did our first mailing to our thousands of Australian subscribers in support of a campaign there.

Travels – I continue to be invited to speak at union events around the world.  My upcoming travel schedule includes visits to Egypt, Turkey, Canada and Brazil — all within the next two months.  The last of these (not yet confirmed) is to speak at the SIGTUR congress for trade unionists from throughout the global south.  They are particularly keen on UnionBook.

The nominations phase is now over and there have been 299 nominations made.  This is a significant improvement over the Labour Photo of the Year, which saw only 189 submissions this year.  In other words, the Labour Video of the Year competition has obviously captured the imagination of our readers and is already a success.  I’ve closed the nominations and am turning things over the international panel of judges to come up with a shortlist.  Voting for the winning video will take place next month.

Here’s a new tool that shows who is posting the news each day on LabourStart.  Interesting to note how few correspondents are active, and who the active ones are.

At the request of Chris Garlock, from the Washington DC Metro Labor Council, I’ve extended the deadline for submissions for the Labour Video of the Year competition by one week.  So far, there have been 165 submissions.  I used the opportunity to remind readers about several union films related resources, including LabourStart.tv, the Labour films group on UnionBook, the online labour films database and list of labour film festivals that we co-sponsor, and Tom Zaniello’s book, which we sell through UCS (and which is really one of our best-sellers).

The Labour Video of the Year competition has really taken off, with 100 videos already nominated.  For the complete list, see here.

As we discussed at our conference in Washington last summer, LabourStart will this year be sponsoring the first ever global Labour Video of the Year competition.  Nominations are now open and the nominating form is here.  As nominations come through, you’ll be able to view them here.

Publicity is crucial for the success of this project, so here’s what we’re doing (this will be updated as more is done):

1. Site publicized as a top global news story on LabourStart – and therefore on our global labour newswire
2. It is also a news item on LabourStart.tv
3. Posted to Twitter.
4. Posted to Facebook – Eric Lee’s account.
5. Posted to Facebook – LabourStart Group wall.
6. Message sent to all 2,776 members of the LabourStart Facebook group.
7. It’s a site-wide message on UnionBook, seen by anyone visiting the site.
8. Message posted to the British TUC’s UnionReps site
9. 5 Feb: Mailing to over 52,000 names on the English language LabourStart list.
10. 8 Feb: Now this is great publicity! (Translation via Google: “Espen Løken in Industrial Energy calls for Norwegian videos from the workplace to an international competition organized by LabourStart”)

I’ve posted the first rough draft agenda for the conference online and have written to all our correspondents to share it with them, urging them all to post their comments.

Here are today’s totals with the change since the end of December in brackets.  The total for mailing lists now includes all users of laborlists.org — and this now includes a small number who are not subscribers to LabourStart’s own lists.  There is no longer any redundancy — someone who is on both the English list and another list is no longer counted twice.  So the figure of 62,225 is much closer to an accurate number than we’ve had for some time now.  To make it easier to track progress on our largest list, I’m now including the total for the English LabourStart list as well.

• Mailing lists – subscribers: 62,225 [+1,690]
• LabourStart’s English language mailing list – 52,548
• UnionBook – members: 4,366 [+38]
• Facebook – members of LabourStart group: 2,764 [+160]
• Twitter – followers: 1,987 [+47]
• Correspondents: 732 [+10]
• Union group on Flickr: 527 [+1]
• LinkedIn – members of LabourStart group: 137 [+58]

PSI has promoted the online films database, the film festivals database, and even Tom Zaniello’s book on labour films (with a link that ensures LabourStart gets its share) in their most recent mailing to affiliates, here.