Inside LabourStart

It took all morning, but my entire email backlog (was 144 messages 4 hours ago) has been cleared and I’ve written 100 messages this morning. Among other things, I added new correspondents in Mauritius, France and Canada.

A couple of weeks ago we asked our readers to tell the Filipino government to release a jailed labour lawyer. At least one embassy has begun sending out form responses, which have been forwarded to us:

Thank you for your letter expressing concern over the reported arrest of Atty. Remegio Saladero, Jr. We welcome this opportunity to address the concerns you have raised. I have conveyed your message to the Philippine Government. I would also like to reassure you that the Philippine Government is committed to promoting and preserving democracy and freedom has no policy calling for the suppression of political dissent and curtailment of worker’s rights. We remain open and prepared to act on concerns that are brought to our attention. The Embassy appreciates your interest in and will remain in touch with you on this matter. Sincerely yours, WILLY C. GAA Ambassador

I’m suspending our Korea campaign (which generated 5,922 messages of protest) after we received this message from the KCTU’s International Secretary, Lee Changgeun.

Thank you for your solidarity. We received the protest messages and published it. In case of First Vice-president, Sis. Jin young-ok and General Secretary, Bro. Lee Yong-shik, were released on bail. The President of KCTU is still wanted by the police. And some leaders are still in jail including First-vice president of KMWU. I thank you again for your support.

Publicity so far:

• Top story on LabourStart’s front page in English; also appears on sites using our global syndicated news in English
• Labour photo of the day
• Flickr
• LabourStart Facebook group – mailed to all members, over 1,700
• Free the Blackadder One Facebook group – mailed to all 2,516 members
• LabourStart correspondents – mailed to all 500
• Submitted to Labour Research magazine in the UK and The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. Labour Research has replied and may use the winning photo.
• Requested the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in the UK to publicize this with a press release
• Posted to the very popular web forums at UnionReps.org.uk
• Wrote to the more than 50 members of PCS – the winner’s union – on our mailing list.
• Suggested that a Labour MP might wish to make a statement in the Commons. What may now happen is a display in the British Parliament building of the finalist photos – details soon.
• This blog
• Page translated into French.
• International Union Rights has expressed an interest in running the photos.
• We’re on the front page of an important Norwegian union website.

Updated 4 Nov 2008 – see below

We have a lot of newswires, in many languages, and in different formats. Nearly all of them work fine but some require changes. I’ll be listing some of the things I’m fixing here:

1. Norwegian RSS: Now fixed to render correctly in iso-8859-1 (not Unicode). The same change is applied to the French and Dutch newswires today. All would have been showing the wrong dates for news stories – now fixed.
2. Wal-Mart JS: today fixed to use new database
3. McDonalds JS: now fixed to use new database – used only on McJobs.org (not yet live)
4. Nestle, Unilever JS: Created in early October at the request of the IUF and used on their sites
5. Women’s news in Finnish: Updated to use the new database – used by SAK, the Finnish national trade union center

More soon …

While we wait to hear if we’re going to be moved up to the next level, some interesting statistics:

• Of 2,084 applications, we were rated 6th, with a score of 4.3 (Excellent), based on 395 ratings.
• In the list of ‘most viewed’ applicants, we placed 4th.
• We had just under 290 comments posted, nearly all of them very favorable.

We received this email today:

The 3 emails you sent for me to Gap Inc Dan Henkle, Darryl Knudsen, and CEO Glenn Murphy did not go and were resent to me. Fortunately their complete address was on the email. Hence, I was able to send a letter to these executives at Gap. Thanks for doing this work for workers rights and for including full addresses to allow people to send returned emails by regular mail. Actually that makes the letters twice as powerful as the email.

I should add that at the request of other readers, the email addresses of our targets also appear on the campaign page, for those who want to send out the emails themselves and not through our system.

Voting has now been halted. There is a clear winner. We’ll announce it here, and then to correspondents, the media, our email subscribers and the general public. Please be a bit more patient …

You have to see this to believe it.

2,227 of our readers have clicked through to look at our proposal for the News Challenge prize. 255 of them have rated it, giving it an average of 4.4 (Excellent).

But here’s the best bit — the comments. By my count, there are nearly 170 extraordinary comments from our readers.

Required reading, comrades.

This week’s mailing has just gone out. The main thing is to ask people to give our News Challenge bid some support, both by giving us five stars and adding supportive comments. If we can flood the News Challenge website with such messages, it might convince the judges that we really do have such a global constituency. I don’t know if this will have any effect, but I can’t see it hurting.

We’re also reminding people about last week’s Oak Harbor/Gap campaign which has drawn a response from the company and a counter-response from the union (which we’re publishing in full).

And there’s a reminder at the end about the U.S. elections which we really can’t ignore, even if we know for certain that I’ll get a handful of angry emails from supporters of minor, third and fourth party candidates. For 99.999% of the organized working class in the U.S., the impending victory of Obama and the Democrats is an event of historic proportions an we need to acknowledge that.

Impact of the email message:

As of 31.10 07:38 GMT –

• News Challenge – 21 views, rating of 2.3 stars
• Oak Harbor campaign – 2,430 messages sent
• Oak Harbor Facebook cause – 1,050 supporters
• Labour Photo of the Year – 2,648 votes cast