Inside LabourStart

Ramzi Dardar – still in jail.

Algeria campaign: Following a conversation with IndustriALL – in which we learned that Ramzi remains in jail – we decided to ramp up publicity, both LabourStart and IndustriALL. We will make a special effort to reach out to unions in the Arab world.

Myanmar: We closed down the campaign with BWI’s permission. As they summed it up, “Early November, the CGU [Council of Global Unions] sent out letters to the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly] credentials committee chair and members with the signatories of the petition in attachment, asking to reject the junta’s credential. On 1 December, the credentials committee deferred the decision – rejecting the junta’s credential for the moment. Good first step.” This is good news and we believe that our campaign contributed to this.

Palestine: A couple of us participated in the webinar organised by Maan – and we expect a new campaign to be launched in the new year.

Puerto Rico: After three months we asked whether we could suspend the campaign and have been told we should keep it live for now.

Mailing lists: In the absence of new campaigns, the list is only growing slowly – we picked up just 37 new subscribers this week. This will grow in the new year.

Twitter: We have just under 30,000 followers to LabourStart’s main global account (in English) – and by the time you read this, we will probably have reached our target. Well done to all those who have invested many hours in growing our presence on this important social media platform – especially Derek.

Palestine: We had a long call with WAC Maan to discuss one of their current struggles to unionise food workers in the West Bank.  We will find ways to help.

Africa: We did a second mailing to our Africa correspondents about holding an online meeting in January.

Algeria: We’ve proposed closing this campaign down, and will have a discussion with IndustriALL next week about this.

Campaign victories in 2021: Our intern Cam prepared a report on our wins, which we shared with our mailing lists.

Myanmar: We will shortly be closing down this campaign with the agreement of BWI.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast we did, which had 215 listeners and was the 2nd most popular they had ever done, rose to 278 in the last week.

T-shirts: We included a promotion for the Working Class History t-shirt of the month in this week’s mailing.

Twitter: Our list of global unions which had 25 followers this week now has 73 followers.

Twitter: We created a List of global unions and publicised it widely across social media (but not yet in a mass mailing). The list already has 25 followers and we’ve been re-tweeting many of the posts there to boost interest in what the global unions are saying and doing.

Africa: We wrote to all 68 correspondents we identified in 19 countries noting that we’ll hold our first online event with them in January.

Romania: With the agreement of the ETF, we closed down the long-running campaign in support of Bucharest metro workers.  The campaign had nearly 7,800 supporters, making it one of the largest recent campaigns.

Interns: We will be reaching out to labour studies departments looking for recent graduates as potential paid interns (living wage). We have also been approached by GLU to again take interns this coming year.

LabourStartJobs.org: We gave further publicity to this sub-site of LabourStart, which continues to feature jobs in unions in the UK and Canada, with a smattering form elsewhere.  27 jobs were posted here in the first 9 days of December.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by another 143 subscribers this week – 96 of those for the English list.

Podcast: The Union Dues podcast (UK) featuring Eric Lee talking about LabourStart is the third most popular they have ever done, with about 215 listeners. We did a further round of publicity later in the week to boost this a bit.

Africa: Work continues on preparing for our first-ever online meeting of correspondents. We have a tool that will allow our intern to compile a current list of all correspondents for the more than 50 African nations.  It turns out that we have 30 volunteer correspondents in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Nigeria with others scattered across the continent, and it will be good to meet them all — even if the meeting is on Zoom.

Brazil: With the agreement of PSI, we are closing down this campaign after many months.

Colombia: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer.

Jordan: We had an online meeting with the Education International to discuss next steps in this campaign. These will include online events in English and Arabic and a major effort to ramp up support for the Arabic version of the campaign.

Newswires: We have begun the process of repair, having fixed the Dutch and Norwegian newswires. Many more will be done in the coming days.

Pakistan: We have been asked to keep this campaign live for a while longer; there has apparently been some progress on the ground and the campaign is having an effect.

T-shirts: We did a second mass mailing to promote the t-shirts with Working Class History.  We’ll shortly share the results  — when we get them.

UnionDues podcast: This went live on 30 November. According to their website, it has been downloaded more than 200 times. We gave this podcast extensive publicity, including a mass mailing to our English list. (Our own counter shows just under 500 people clicked on our version of the link to the podcast.)

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: 75323-75384

French: 7758-7756

German: 5818-5817

Spanish: 5440-5545

Turkish: 4233

Korean: 3299

Italian: 3211-3215

Russian: 2703

Norwegian: 2202-2212

Dutch: 1536-1531

The others:

Arabic:  822-823

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 946

Creole:  11

Czech: 63

Danish: 96

Esperanto: 175

Farsi:  209

Finnish:  487

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  307-309

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  188

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 393

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 849-861

Portuguese: 1339-1341

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  1772

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 982

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  656

LabourStart Translators:  88

Flickr:

836 members.

10217-10204 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13545-13544

LabourStart.org page follows: 14461-14456

Global Labour News and Information: 8905-8902

LabourStart UK likes:  2044-2045

LabourStart UK follows:  2101

LabourStart Francophone: 590

LabourStart Brasil:  505-504

LabourStart Turkce:  2116-2122

LabourStart TV likes: 448-451

LabourStart TV follows:  460

LabourStart Israel: NOT FOUND-149

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2418-2405 members.

Page: 96-93 follows.

Twitter:

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

Global English: 29326-28644

Canada English: 17328-17001

Global Spanish: 5905-5859

USA: 5548-5557

Australia: 6053-5436

Portuguese: 5318-5257

Canada French: 3115-3112

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  42

Italian: 507-506 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 337-339  (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350-349 (last tweet 2015)

French: 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)

Amazon: We shared a link to all LabourStart’s coverage of struggles at Amazon on Black Friday (today).

Germany: Apparently, our Twitter feed came under attack from some far-right accounts.

Jordan: One month after the launch of the campaign we asked Education International about possible next steps, including a webinar

Norway: IndustriEnergi voted at its congress to make a very generous donation to LabourStart.
We have fixed the Norwegian newswire but now need to get the word out about changes that need to be made.

Sweden: We had a very good discussion with LO about cooperation in future.

UK: We did a mailing to our UK list (about 9,600 people) in supporting of striking couriers in Sheffield.
The Union Dues podcast has been finalised and will be released next week. As it’s all about LabourStart, we’ll share it widely.

Africa: We are discussing holding our first ever African regional meeting of LabourStart correspondents. More details soon.

Algeria: We did a second mailing to our English list today. The campaign has 4,774 supporters, but we expect this to above 5,000 today.

Nigeria: We are continuing publicity for the Yoruba versions of our campaigns, two of which have already been translated.

Sweden: We closed down our Zalando’s campaign today and informed the union there. The campaign had about 3,500 supporters, though the Swedish version only had 2.

UK: Eric was interviewed for the labour podcast “Union Dues” – it will be aired in another couple of weeks and we’ll publicise it widely.

T-shirts: We did a mailing to our German list. Sales of the dna-merch shirts have not been as high as we would have liked (they are only a fraction of what we sold last year). We will continue the marketing and are in discussions with our friends about what we can do to improve this.

This was a relatively quiet week for us, as Eric was on holiday with family for part of the time.

Algeria: This campaign goes live and after just a day or so, had 3,200 supporters.  It currently appears in 4 languages with many more on the way.

Sweden: We began publicity for this campaign on Thursday with a mailing to the English list. As of 10:30 GMT, the campaign has 722 supporters.

Mailing lists: Grew this week by 103 names.

T-shirt of the Month: We began to publicise this wonderful new project from Working Class History and dna merch in Germany. We did extensive publicity across social media and a mass mailing, and will know results in early December. Feedback was almost entirely positive.  We expect to do publicity in German soon (dna merch is based in Germany).

Algeria: Expect a new campaign shortly — we’ve been given a heads up from IndustriALL.

Jordan: Our new campaign has taken off and already has more supporters (6,020) than our two most recent camopaigns. That’s the good news; the bad news is that a court has ruled against the union.

Nigeria: Our first campaign in the Yoruba language has now gone live and we have begun publicising it.  So far, no one has signed up to the campaign.

Sudan: We shared widely Eric’s column about the role of unions in the fight for democracy and against the military coup.

Donations: We received a very generous — and unexpected — donation from Education International.

Mailing lists: We picked up another 133 subscribers this week; this is more than triple what we added last week.

T-shirts: We’re about to embark on a join effort with DNA Merch in Germany to sell workers’ history themed t-shirts on a monthly basis.

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 effects of the EU’s GDPR.  While several mailing lists continue to decline we are in fact adding as many new addresses to those lists as we have done historically when we have a new campaign running.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 75384-75153

French: 7756-7753

German: 5817-5812

Spanish: 5545-5189

Turkish: 4233

Korean: 3299

Italian: 3215-3216

Russian: 2703

Norwegian: 2212-2202

Dutch: 1531-1522

The others:

Arabic:  823

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 946-949

Creole:  11

Czech: 63-64

Danish: 96

Esperanto: 175-173

Farsi:  209-212

Finnish:  487-489

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  309-306

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  188

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 393

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 861

Portuguese: 1341

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  1772

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 982

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  656

LabourStart Translators:  88-87

Flickr:

836-835members. 

10204-10165 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13544-13539

LabourStart.org page follows: 14456-14437

Global Labour News and Information: 8902-8909

LabourStart UK:  2045

LabourStart Francophone: 590-589

LabourStart Brasil:  504

LabourStart Turkce:  2122-2124

LabourStart TV: 451

LabourStart Israel: 149

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2405-2394 members.

Page: 93-91 follows.

Twitter:

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

Global English: 28644-28277

Canada English: 17001-16777

Global Spanish: 5859-5840

USA: 5557-5561

Australia: 5436-5432

Portuguese: 5257-5237

Canada French: 3112-3080

Russian: 46

Hebrew:  42

Italian: 506-498 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 339-340  (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 349 (last tweet 2015)

French: 225-226 (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)