Inside LabourStart

Ukraine: Following the Russian invasion on Thursday morning, we have made certain to offer comprehensive coverage of the trade union reaction in Ukraine, Russia and around the world on our news page and across social media.

We have also been in touch with all 18 of our correspondents in Ukraine.  One of them wrote back, saying:

“Thank you very much for your genuine support. At the moment we need as strong an international reaction as possible,  more demonstrations and political pressure on the EU and the governments to react with economic and political sanctions against Putin, his family members and Russian corporations. And Ukraine needs financial and military support as well.  It is also obvious that we will need help in providing humanitarian aid to the union members, refugees and war victims. We appreciate your support and will let you know what that may mean in practical terms.”

Cambodia: Thanks to a mass mailing to members of the UNITE HERE union in the USA promoting the campaign, it jumped to nearly 15,000 supporters — a gain of nearly 2,000 in just one day.

Colombia: Our campaign continues to grow following our follow-up mailing. The number of supporters has grown from 4,809 to 6,092 as a result.

Lithuania: Our campaign went live this last week. Today it appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 4,272 supporters.  It will be our first campaign ever in all three Baltic languages — including Estonian and Latvian.

Instagram: Our presence there has been vastly improved and the number of followers is starting to grow.

International Women’s Day: We are now expecting to organise a major online event featuring domestic workers and in partnership with their global union.

Mailing list: Our list continues to grow as we add new campaigns. This week we picked up 399 new subscribers – and launched our mailing list in Lithuanian.

Campaigns: Last week I reported that we had 3 campaigns in the pipeline, including ones for Colombia and Lithuania. Those both went live this week. The Colombia campaign is already in 16 languages and has 4,455 supporters.

As for the campaign we expected on Turkey — there’s no news at the moment.

But in addition we have received proposed campaigns from the Hungarian teachers union and EPSU, the European regional body for public sector workers.

The Cambodia campaign has grown a bit from 12,355 supporters to 12,995, a gain of 640 supporters this week.

Interns: Our three new interns from the Global Labour University – Jessica, Malaika and Zubair – began work on Wednesday this week.

Campaigns: We expect to launch campaigns shortly in support of workers in Colombia, Lithuania and Turkey. Details soon.

Algeria: With the agreement of IndustriALL we have now closed this campaign. Unfortunately, our comrade Ramzi is still in jail. The struggle continues.

Cambodia: We wrote to dozens of our translators in six languages — resulting in three more translations. But we still have nothing in Japanese, Arabic and Swedish, which is a problem. The campaign continues to grow — now in 22 languages with 12,355 supporters. But growth has slowed.

Iran: At the request of some comrades, we shared statements from Iranian workers’ organisations about expelling Iran from the ILO with senior figures in the global unions.

Jordan: Next month we will host (and promote) a major global webinar in support of Jordan’s embattled teachers’ union. We will reactivate the online campaign before then.

Fund raising: Two unions in Norway made generous donations last week.

Interns: Our three new interns will start their work on Wednesday next week.

Mailing lists: Our mailing lists continue to grow due to the Cambodia campaign – we picked up 223 new subscribers this week, and doubled the size of our small Hindi language list.

Internationalisation: We made a number of improvements to the Russian language home page, adding corrections to the language and replacing the occasional English phrase with the Russian equivalent.

Working Class History T-shirts: We discussed next steps with our friends at DNA-Merch and received payment for the few shirts we sold.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

We continue to see the negative effects of the EU’s GDPR.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 77567-75105

French: 7836-7745

German: 5846-5838

Spanish: 5561-5338

Turkish: 4222

Korean: 3299

Italian: 3187-3205

Russian: 2703

Norwegian: 2179-2195

Romanian:  1772

Dutch: 1551-1539

The others:

Arabic:  832

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 944

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 95

Esperanto: 176

Farsi:  209

Finnish:  472

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  306-307

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  187-188

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 396-393

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 850-849

Portuguese: 1344

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 982

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  660-657

LabourStart Translators:  89-88

Africa Caucus:  63 NEW

Flickr:

836 members.

10237-10223photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13554-13536

LabourStart.org page follows: 14477-14456

Global Labour News and Information: 8963-8905

LabourStart UK likes:  2036-2040

LabourStart UK follows:  2095-2097

LabourStart Francophone: 588

LabourStart Brasil:  503-505

LabourStart Turkce:  2107-2113

LabourStart TV likes: 447-448

LabourStart TV follows:  460

LabourStart Israel: NOT FOUND-149

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2438

Page: 103

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language, Portuguese-language, Spanish-language and Australian feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

Global English: 30795-30205

Canada English: 18039-17786

Global Spanish: 6409-6089

USA: 5551-5567

Australia: 6755-6294

Portuguese: 6518-5900

Canada French: 3112-3110

Russian: 45-46

Hebrew:  42 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 505-507

Swedish: 336-338 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 226-227 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

Cambodia: Our campaign continues to grow – we are nearly at 12,000 supporters with translations into 20 languages. It appeared in additional languages last week including Sinhalese, Indonesian, Hindi, Thai and Punjabi. We will be following up regarding missing translations later today – including Korean, Japanese, Swedish, Finnish, etc.  Eric Lee’s article on the struggle in Cambodia was shared widely.

Colombia: We expect a new campaign to be launched next week.  Details coming soon.

Myanmar: We publicised our news page on the first anniversary of the military coup – http://www.labourstart.org/go/1year. We also participated in an online event in support of a brands boycott of Myanmar, as proposed by the unions there.

Other Campaigns: We closed the Jordan teachers and Puerto Rico electrical workers campaigns this week.

Interns: We are down to three interns from the Global Labour University coming on board in mid-February as two have chosen to do their internships elsewhere.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 496 this week — due entirely to the fast-growing Cambodia campaign.

T-shirts: We apparently helped to sell 18 Rosa Luxemburg t-shirts last month.

Cambodia: Our campaign had more than 10,000 supporters by mid-day — our largest campaign in several years. One result of this has been a big increase in the size of our mailing lists. Another is that the company has been forced to make a rare public pronouncement insisting that they are not busting unions (they are).

Colombia: We have a draft campaign in the works, probably to go live next week. The previous campaign is now closed.

Latin America: We have plans to hold an online regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents – details coming soon.

Thailand: We had a long online chat with the Solidarity Centre staff there to discuss cooperation, including future campaigns together.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from the BC Government Employees union in Canada.

Interns: We will be having five interns from the Global Labour University and are currently planning their projects.

T-shirts: We did an unprecedented second mass mailing promoting the Rosa Luxemburg shirts. With fingers crossed, we hope to have helped sell a few. We should have an update next week.

Cambodia: We launched a major new campaign with the support of the IUF. As of right now, the campaign has 4,700 supporters and appears in ten languages.

Donations: PSI has made another generous donation to LabourStart.

Interns: We interviewed five potential interns from the Global Labour University and have decided to take them all. They will begin work in mid-February for about six weeks.

Our next book: Good progress is being made on our next book, an updated version of our ‘Campaigning Online and Winning’ book from several years ago.

T-shirts: We continued with weekly publicity across social media and next week we’ll include a reminder in the mass mailing as well. This month’s shirt featuring Rosa Luxemburg should prove more popular than the previous ones, we think.

Cambodia: Striking workers at NagaWorld band together to protect union leaders from further arrests.

Cambodia: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of jailed casino union leaders.

Iran: Our three-month-old campaign has now been closed in all languages.

Kazakhstan: Following the release of jailed union leaders, a decision was taken not to launch a LabourStart campaign at this time. However, the ITUC did issue a strong statement which we shared widely on our news pages and across social media.

Fundraising: We now have a draft letter and have reached out to a couple of global unions which donated during this quarter last year.

Interns: The Global Labour University has put us in touch with five students; we will be interviewing them all early next week.

T-shirts: We did a second round of publicity to promote the Rosa Luxemburg t-shirt, across social media. Later in the month, we’ll send out a mass mailing as well.

Kazakhstan: We are posting news and monitoring the situation in Kazakhstan; an online campaign is being considered by our partners.

Correspondents: We picked up one new correspondent in the USA and reconnected another. We hope to shortly hold our first ever (virtual) meeting of the more than 115 LabourStart correspondents in the USA.

Fundraising: Our first major donation of 2022 has arrived and its from the IUF in Geneva.

Instagram: We are renewing our work on the LabourStart page on Instagram, helped by one of our interns. If you’re on Instagram, please do follow this page and share it with others – thanks!

Interns: We are about to start interviewing possible interns who are currently studying at the Global Labour Labour University.

T-shirts: We’ve begun promoting the third working class history t-shirt of the month, this time featuring Rosa Luxemburg.

Twitter: In late December we reached our target of 30,000 followers for our global feed in English on Twitter.  This morning we were at 30,323.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of last month.  Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since last month.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in Italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

We continue to see the negative effects of the EU’s GDPR.

Mailing Lists:

Lists Over 1500:

English: 75105-75323

French: 7745-7758

German: 5838-5818

Spanish: 5338-5440

Turkish: 4222-4233

Korean: 3299

Italian: 3205-3211

Russian: 2703

Norwegian: 2195-2202

Romanian:  1772

Dutch: 1539-1536

The others:

Arabic:  832-822

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 944-946

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 95-96

Esperanto: 176-175

Farsi:  209

Finnish:  472-487

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  307

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  188

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 393

Malaysian: 21-6

Polish: 849

Portuguese: 1344-1339

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 982

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  657

LabourStart Translators:  88

Africa Caucus:  63 NEW

Flickr:

836 members.

10223-10217 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

LabourStart.org page likes:  13536-13545

LabourStart.org page follows: 14456-14461

Global Labour News and Information: 8905

LabourStart UK likes:  2040-2044

LabourStart UK follows:  2097-2101

LabourStart Francophone: 588-590

LabourStart Brasil:  505

LabourStart Turkce:  2113-2116

LabourStart TV likes: 448

LabourStart TV follows:  460

LabourStart Israel: NOT FOUND-149

LinkedIn:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2438-2418.

Page: 103-96.

Twitter:

Sporadic efforts were made to grow the Global English-language, Canadian English-language, Portuguese-language, Spanish-language and Australian feeds.  No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for other accounts.

Global English: 30205-29326

Canada English: 17786-17328

Global Spanish: 6089-5905

USA: 5567-5548

Australia: 6294-6053

Portuguese: 5900-5318

Canada French: 3110-3115

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  42 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 507

Swedish: 338-337 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 227-225 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)