Inside LabourStart

A not bad article on UB appearing in an Indian tech magazine site HERE.

Book sales at UCS for the first 21 days of April total $2,821 – or $940 per week.  At this rate, we can sell close to $50,000 worth of books a year, which is excellent.  Sales in this quarter are running about 17 times the rate in Q1 due to our weekly promotions.  Almost $800 of that is sales of the May Day book, which we will continue to sell right up through May 1st.

Over 90% of the users on UnionBook have not chosen a language preference – something we might want to work on by forcing them to choose, or at the very least encouraging them.  At the moment, 217 have chosen English, 8 French, 5 Spanish, 2 German, 1 Dutch and maybe some others.  I’ve written a script to show the breakdown.

In the first 10 days of April, we sold $1,814 worth of books on UCS (our share is 10% of that) and if this trend continues, we will sell over $66,000 worth of books in a year.  That’s not enough to keep LabourStart going, but it is a lot of books (and may help keep UCS going, which is a good thing).

The International Metalworkers Federation has asked for our help to support Turkish metal workers sacked for their membership in a trade union. The campaign is now live in English and our volunteer translators have been asked to do translations into the various languages.  A mass mailing will go out shortly.

As an increasing number of websites now use Unicode for character encoding, we need to begin offering our newswires in this format – which is LabourStart’s default character encoding in any event.  As of this morning, we have Unicode versions of our JavaScript newswire in a dozen languages – Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, German, Spanish, Farsi, French, Hebrew, Spanish, Norwegian and Swedish.  I hope to do all the others by the end of this week.

You’ll now notice PayPal donation buttons on the home pages of LabourStart in a number of languages including English, French, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, and German.  In all cases where this is possible, the PayPal interface is translated into the local language and we’re using the local currency (dollars, Euros, Norwegian kronen).  There are similar buttons with English language interface for the Canadian and UK news pages — using Canadian dollars and British pounds sterling.  In some cases (the English and French home pages, as well as the Canada and UK news pages) we have some additional text other than the donate button — which we should aim to do in all cases.  All this is part of an effort to encourage our readers to help support LabourStart with donations.

After four months – we’ve gotten permission from the International Metalworkers Federation to suspend this campaign.  The campaign had 2,415 messages sent in 7 languages.

Campaigns:

• We’ve asked to close down the Russian campaign after 4 months and 2,415 supporters.
• We are about to launch a new campaign in support of Turkish workers.  Both campaigns came from the International Metalworkers Federation.
• Campaign counter now works on all languages.

News:

• Work has begun on localizing the entry of news links – we’re testing this on French first.  The aim is to have all the input screens work in the local language so we can recruit correspondents who don’t know any English at all.

Book sales:

• We’ve sold 53 copies of the Global Unions, Global Business book, which is not bad.
• The Union Books group has 71 members, making it one of the largest groups on UnionBook.
• We’ve sold $986.55 worth of books at UCS in the first week of April.
• We’re in negotiations with the bookstore of one of the largest unions in Europe, Ver.di, in Berlin and might be able to begin selling German-language union books to German trade union members.
• We’re also talking to an Australian university press about helping to sell one of its titles.

Newswires:

• Did some more work on creating a Unicode version of these for sites which have switched over to Unicode. So far, French and German are working.

Fundraising:

• There will be concert in Sheffield on 2 May the proceeds of which will be donated to LabourStart – more details soon.
• We’re also finishing up the deal with No Sweat Apparel to produce a union-made UnionBook t-shirt.
• We’re following up with possible donations to LabourStart from Unite (UK) and CUPE (Canada).

Sales in the first 3 days of April at UCS now exceed sales for all of the first quarter of 2009.  The numbers are not massive – $797.65, which translates at $79.76 for us (£53.82) – but still, it’s good.

And the Union Books group on UnionBook now has 45 members — seven of whom have suggested books!