Inside LabourStart

Thanks to Yishay Mor for telling us about the Knight News Challenge – a five million dollar annual competition. I’ve quickly done up an application for $80,000 – the deadline is this weekend – and while our chance of getting any of this money is slim, it’s worth a shot. I’m going to ask our mailing list (at least the English speakers) to visit the site, to give us a high rating and to add their comments. Who knows? Meanwhile, please go to the site, sign up, find our application and rate us highly adding your comments. I think this is the direct link to our proposal, but I’m not sure.

As we’ve now learned, the ILO’s Solicomm search engine lags behind LabourStart somewhat in terms of languages, but they do have ‘About Solicomm’ pages in a handful of them. Where these exist, we are now linking to them — such as in French.

I’ve just added addresses of new subscribers to the list who came through the Oak Harbor campaign. The total in the last few days is 199 which is a nice gain. This is for the English list only.

I also spent some time today going through 26 emails I’ve recently received from people asking me to either unsubscribe them, subscribe them, or change their addresses. Yes, people can do all of this themselves, but I’ve long followed a policy of doing this for individuals when asked.

The results are always the same — only a few of the people are on the list because between when they email me and when I get around to unsubscribing them, they figure out how to do it themselves. Or it turns out that they are not on our mailing list at the address they think and I can’t find them. It’s time consuming, but it’s important to keep people happy.

It still surprises me how many of our 57,000 subscribers write to me personally, asking me to note their change. This sense of being a small community will eventually change. What will happen when we have a million subscribers?

Finally, following upon the advice given to me by Nick Holden from Unionlists, I’ve now gone into every one of our mailing lists and changed the email address from which messages are sent. It should no longer mention unionlists and from now on, in all lists, come from LabourStart <ericlee@labourstart.org>.

I received this email today from Mike Abrahams from SACCAWU, in South Africa:

Clearly the LabourStart campaign was a contributing factor not only in putting pressure on the company, but also in strengthening the resolve and unity of workers who received regular updates of Solidarity including the LabourStart campaign. However we anticipate the possibility of further difficulties with the company around the same issues, especially since we’ve noticed a systematic suspension of shopfloor leaders since the return to work. I will keep you posted.

Some time ago I began an overhaul of our campaign page — the page that shows an active campaign. The main thing the new page will do is allow one-click campaigning with no more need for a confirmation page. I still have a fairly long to do list but here are the changes implemented so far in the new page – which is not yet live:

1. By default, all campaigns now have ‘utf-8’ (Unicode) embedded in the ‘reserve’ field; this ensures that they will display correctly.
2. The ‘image’ field, which was not being used, is now used for a numeric code to be used for Facebook causes setup in parallel to the campaigns. You can see this at work in the Oak Harbor campaign.

I’ll continue to update this entry and will move it to the top of this blog as changes are made.

The regional news pages for Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central America and South America are now working again – in English. The JavaScript and RSS news feeds still need some work.

When we set up a campaign, we always tell the union that it’s for three months maximum. For a number of reasons, we just don’t run stale campaigns on LabourStart.

Still, unions sometimes ask us to extend a campaign beyond three months and more often, unions just don’t communicate well with us, don’t tell us when we can close the campaign down.

We have two old campaigns now running on LabourStart, both of which are overdue for closing down. I’ve written to both the campaign initiators today and if I don’t hear from them, will unilaterally close down the campaigns by the end of the week. I’m referring to this campaign and this one.

LabourStart has lead the way in the international trade union movement with its 22 languages but we need to do more. We know that many of our pages retain elements of English and are not as user-friendly as they might be to non-English speakers.

Andy Funnell in France has made a number of helpful suggestions which I have begun implementing. I welcome other suggestions as well as offers to help.

Here’s what we’ve done today:

1. The searchbox and mailing list signup now end with the more universal ‘OK’ rather than the English ‘Go’.
2. In the French version – and soon others – the ‘search union websites with Solicomm’ phrase has been translated.
3. In the French version – and others if they want – ‘ActNOW’ on the front page has been translated into French. I realize that in some languages, they would prefer to stick with ‘ActNOW’.
4. I’ve now separated out top stories from others – in the French version with two separate titles and in all others, for the moment, with a horizontal bar. Your suggestions for how to title the two sections would be appreciated.
5. I’ve improved the French translation of the signup to our mailing list phrase – the ones we were using were taken from the IUF site, but apparently the translations are not what our correspondents want to see.
6. I’ve fixed a bug which meant that if you clicked on, for example, ‘Suisse’ next to a story on the French page it would show you English language stories from Switzerland. Now it shows the French ones. This is fixed for all languages.

One of our readers forwarded this message on to me today. Further proof – as if any were needed – that our campaigns are effective.

From: gap.com Customer Service [mailto:custserv@gap.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 2:06 PM
To: **********
Subject: Re: GapCanada.ca Feedback (KMM76888400I28583L0KM)

Dear ******,

Thank you for your email about the current dispute between Oak Harbor
and the Teamsters. While we are aware, Gap Inc. is not a party to the
dispute and is not involved in negotiations in any way. We have been
monitoring the situation closely and have strongly urged both parties to
negotiate in good faith and to come to a fair and timely resolution.

Gap Inc. has a long-standing record as a socially responsible company,
and we set very high standards for ourselves as well as the vendors and
suppliers we work with. This has been demonstrated time and again over
the past decade, and is well-documented in our three social
responsibility reports. As guided by our long-standing work in the area
of social responsibility, we know that any rash decisions related to
changing contracts can have immediate and long-lasting impacts on the
suppliers and their employees. For that reason, we feel it?s critical
that we give Oak Harbor and the Teamsters an opportunity to resolve this
matter.

We thank you again for taking the time to contact us about this matter.
For more information about our social responsibility efforts, please
visit our website at gapinc.com.

Sincerely,

Maureen Carter
Gap Inc.

I’ve just sent out a mailing to our more than 52,000 subscribers in English. Even though it’s a Sunday, the effect of the mailing should be dramatic. The things we’ve asked people to do, and which we can monitor, include:

1. Sending off a message in support of Oak Harbor strikers and join the associated Facebook cause.
2. Voting in the Labour Photo of the Year.
3. Donating to LabourStart.

In order to measure the impact of the mailing, it’s important to know our baseline, where we are starting from. So here are the initial numbers:

• Messages sent in Oak Harbor campaign – 83 (English only)
• Signed up to Facebook cause – 132 (Yes, 49 more than those who sent messages)
• Labour Photo of the Year – 2,070 votes cast
• Donations – none so far today

Stay tuned – update coming soon …

Updated 27.10.08 08:51 GMT

Campaign – 1,536
Facebook group – 458
Labour Photo of the Year – 2,212
Donations – $80.00 (4 donations)