Inside LabourStart

We’re now up to just under 59,000 addresses on the mailing lists – with substantial net growth in the last couple of weeks due to the Iran campaign.

A few things from the last couple of weeks that I haven’t updated yet here …

• LabourStartJobs.org will finally close down this summer.  We needed to give 6 months notice.  Once this is closed, we can consider launching a free jobs board for trade unionists – this is something we might want to discuss this summer.
• UnionBook now has over 2,500 users though not all have confirmed.  We continue to send out weekly mailings to all of them.  In the last 7 days, we’ve picked up another 122 users.  We have a list of things we want done to the site and have hired someone to do these things.
• The ActNOW wire in French has been fixed – this is part of a whole bunch of problems we’ve had after we converted LabourStart to Unicode without waiting for the rest of the trade union movement to join us – meaning that we’ve had to re-convert some of our content back to earlier formats to display properly on union websites.
• We’ve submitted a proposal to Unite, the largest union in the UK, asking for support.
• The link to show more news for individual countries now works properly in all languages.
• Having written our first script that can read the UnionBook database – it shows the size of the various groups – we can now do much more.  We can create our own tools to monitor and administer the system.
• We’ve submitted a draft early day motion to the British House of Commons regarding UnionBook – this will probably be introduced in the next few days.
• The Labour News Network in its most recent incarnation (Jottit) has now been closed down.  UnionBook replaces it.
• We’ll shortly begin selling this book – waiting for final confirmation from the publisher.
• We’re exploring moving our campaigns from the existing 1&1 server – which could not handle the most recent flood of participants – to our new dedicated server which we use for UnionBook.  This should solve the problem.
• NoSweat Apparel in the US has offered to produce UnionBook t-shirts which we will shortly begin selling.
• There’s probably more, but I can’t remember it all.

LabourStart’s latest stats are now available.

We’ve run, as it turns out, 20 campaigns in the last 12 months.  The results appear below (English language totals only).  Here are some quick observations:

• The country we protest the most about is Iran – and the 3 campaigns we waged in support of Iranian workers were among the top 6 campaigns we ran.  Clearly this a popular subject.
• We also ran 3 campaigns in support of workers in Turkey – including our most popular campaign this year, and 2 of the top 5 campaigns we ran.
• The most popular campaigns focus on workers’ rights issues – arrests, murders, whippings.  The campaigns at the bottom of the list are more traditional workplace issues like failure to negotiate or recognize a union.
• Campaigns which we publicized to specific audiences only (Canada, Australia) in general were considerably smaller than the global campaigns.
• The two biggest campaigns focussed on women — and both had good photos of the women.
• Campaigns in support of workers in the countries our readers live in — Canada, the USA, Australia — were the weakest.

Here is the list:

7412 Turkey: Free jailed woman trade union leader [30-Jun-2008]
5771 Iran: Protest intensified repression against labour activists – No to whippings and executions! [14-Aug-2008]
5571 Iran: Save the life of Farzad Kamangar [28-Nov-2008]
5345 Korea: Stop arrests of trade union leaders [04-Aug-2008]
5121 Turkey: DESA leather workers fight for the right to have a union [16-Nov-2008] – still active
4271 Iran: Drop charges against jailed union leaders [20-Feb-2009] – still active
3439 Colombia: Protest murder of Leonidas Gomez Rozo [04-Apr-2008]
2807 Russia: North Urals mining company refuses to bargain with workers after hunger strike [18-Apr-2008]
2653 Tell the Gap: Don’t Harbor Worker Abuses [24-Oct-2008]
2625 Stop the Attack on Trade Union Rights in Saskatchewan [19-Mar-2008]
2309 USA: Pacific Beach Hotel workers have a right to a union [17-May-2008]
2275 Ireland: BT Discriminates Against own staff because they are Irish [25-Apr-2008]
2122 Russia: Stop attacks on auto workers union [03-Dec-2008] – still active
1452 Turkey: Release jailed road transport union members [30-May-2008]
1335 Australia: Boeing – recognize the union at Hawker de Havilland [10-Jun-2008]
937 South Africa: Woolworths engages in union-busting [10-Oct-2008]
855 USA: Union-busting in Minnesota Attorney General’s Office [27-Feb-2008]
833 Mexico: Reinstate sacked workers in Janos [26-Aug-2008]
825 Tell the Mayor of Ottawa to put an end to the public attack on ATU 279 and return to the bargaining table [24-Jan-2009]
15 Unions in Victoria – Save our TAFES [15-Aug-2008]

We had this problem before and forgot about it – our server cannot take a sudden load.  We’re going to take steps to begin moving parts of LabourStart over to the server we use to host UnionBook – starting with the campaigns.

The Iran campaign launched yesterday was a good example.  In the first hour online, some 400 people succeeded to send off messages – but a certain number hit ‘500’ error messages.  Over the course of about 20 hours, we got a total of 3,774 messages sent – which is very high for us.

The campaign is live in four languages – Dutch, French, German and English.  We’ve received the translation into Spanish and that will go live today.  We’re still waiting for translations into other languages, including Farsi.

I just had a request – as I frequently get – to publicize union news that doesn’t yet appear on the web.  In the past, we’ve always tried to get people to use our Labour News Network for this purpose.  But LNN, no matter how we did, has always been a bit tricky.  The latest version uses Jottit.com, which breaks one of our own rules (over-reliance on free tools that we can’t control).

Today I had an appeal to stop the deportation of a Saudi Arabian trade unionist from Britain.  Instead of posting it to the Jottit site, I used my own blog on UnionBook and made the blog entry public.  Then I linked to it from LabourStart. This way, it will be seen by every user visiting the public front page on UnionBook as well as those visiting LabourStart.

I’m thinking that if we slowly phase out the Jottit site, we can give people one more good reason to use UnionBook – as a publishing platform.

What do you think?

We have over 1,900 people who’ve set up accounts.  Several hundred of them have not completed the process and I’m coping with a large number of emails about that.  We have a tool to manually validate, but I want to use it only when we’re sure that this is a genuine user.

We’ve not gotten access to our new MySQL database and I was able to easily download the user file, meaning that I now have access to all 1,900+ email addresses.

Rather than relying on Elgg’s own mass mailing facility (which crashed our server last time I tried it), I’ve imported these email addresses into a new list I’ve set up at unionlists.org.uk, which we use for all the other LabourStart lists.  Once this is approved by the listmaster (Nick Holden), we can do regular weekly mailings to UnionBook subscribers.  These mailings would aim to engage with readers, to help them use the site and deal with their most common problems, to let them know when there are new features and to encourage them to draw others in.

Check out our latest stats from Google analytics.

I’ve stopped further voting for the 2009 Labour Website of the Year competition and we should announce the results next week.  According to my preliminary tally, the winner this year is the UE, with 262 votes.

The runners up are:

• Union Songs – 232
• Our Times – 193
• USLEAP – 185
• New Unionism Network – 178

This is not the final tally.   There is the possibility of ballot box stuffing, so I’d like to ask for your help to ensure that we’ve got this right.

The only thing we need to determine with any degree of accuracy is which site won, so the question is, did UE get more votes than anyone else?  This requires looking over the raw data and making a decision.

You can help by doing this and adding your comments below this post.

Thanks.

See here.