Inside LabourStart

Egypt: Following recent developments at Lord International we have reached out again to our partners asking if the campaign we created now needs to go live.

Europe: We had a very positive online meeting with EFFAT, the European food workers’ union.

Global: We are helping publicise the ‘Essential for Recovery’ event next week which is being sponsored by ITUC, UNI Global Union, and others.

Puerto Rico: We have reached out to the electrical workers union offering help with their struggle.

Sweden: Our not-yet-launched campaign is on hold for another two weeks while we wait for the decision of the local union, who have gotten back to us.

Fundraising: UNI Global Union has made a very generous donation.

Global labour calendar: We have begun work on this, aiming to have it ready for publication by 1 October.

Internationalisation: We wrote to our Arabic correspondents from Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen asking for their help to revive the page and to translate our campaigns. We did the same with our Hebrew language correspondents, two of whom have now responded favourably. We made a number of additional improvements to both the Arabic and Hebrew editions this week. We also reviewed the Farsi language edition of LabourStart and noted next steps. Other languages will follow.

Jobs: We listed another dozen jobs in the last two weeks and have done a weekly round of publicity across social media. Correspondents are encouraged to help with this as all the jobs being posted are coming from the UK and Canada for the moment.

Our 2014 calendar.

Global Labour Calendar: We plan to have this ready and on sale on 1 October. If you have any great labour photos that we might consider using, please email canada@labourstart.org. If you have ideas for dates we should mark on the calendar, please email ericlee@labourstart.org.

Afghanistan: We have reached out to both national trade union centres in the country, and have also engaged with the ITUC. We continue to upload news stories from unions abroad about Afghanistan, mostly from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

Egypt: We have a campaign ready, but have been asked to place it on hold for the moment.

Iran: We are discussing launching a new campaign with an NGO that campaigns in support of jailed trade unionists, Free Them Now. More details soon.

Myanmar: We are in discussions with a Danish trade union about a possible campaign.

Internationalisation: Having largely completed the fixes to our Hebrew page, we’re now turning our attention to LabourStart’s Arabic language edition — including efforts to revitalise our core group of volunteer correspondents across the Arab world.

LabourStart Jobs: We continue adding jobs, mostly from Canada and the UK for the moment, publicising them across social media every week.

News database: We’ve continued work on the problem of countries whose names have changed. From this week, correspondents will no longer have the option to use the older names of a number of countries, including Swaziland, Burma and East Timor (though people will be able to view news posted under those names in the past).

August is quiet time for many people and even some trade unions — but not for LabourStart.

We’re responding to a number of new appeals for help which come in every day …

Afghanistan: We’re posting any comments and statements by unions which we can find, and have been sharing posts across social media as well.

Egypt: We are just about to launch a new campaign in support of workers at Lord International – details this coming week.

Europe: We have been reaching out to the various European regional organisations of the global union federations, and this coming week will have a call with another of the general secretaries.

Hungary: After a slow start, the campaign has picked up quite a bit – and currently has over 5,200 supporters. We raised the question of Hungarian support for the campaign with ETF.

Iran: A group that campaigns to release jailed trade unionists has reached out to us and we’ve scheduled a call for later this week to discuss joint actions.

Israel: We learned that the workers at 10bis, for whom we campaigned earlier this year, have won a big victory in the courts. We’re waiting for an English translation of the news to appear, and it’s already on our Hebrew language edition. In addition, we made further improvements to how our news shows in Hebrew (and other languages) on the country pages, having fixed the main home page last week.

Puerto Rico: We’ll be following up with several emails in the hope of providing some support for electricity workers there, possibly a campaign.

Sweden: We have prepared a new campaign and are waiting for the green light from the union.

Turkey: We have now closed our campaign in support of Cihan Erdal. The campaign had 7,172 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. As we wrote: “Cihan was ordered released from custody on 15 June 2021. He has to report to the police twice a week and cannot leave the country. Hearings will start again in September 2021.”

LabourStart Jobs: We did the first round of publicity for our new project — https://www.labourstartjobs.org — and will do weekly bursts – including a mailing to our subscribers, and highlighting some key jobs.

New correspondents: We added four new correspondents this week, two from the USA and one each from Morocco and the UK.

Our home page: We had a problem — the second country in a news story was rendering in the correct language on one part of the home page (the bottom) but not the other parts. This is now fixed — the country name is now correctly translated across the whole page.

Belarus: Shared widely the IFJ’s report on “one year of repression” with 29 journalists in captivity.

Hungary: We launch a major new campaign together with ETF.  Just a few days after launch it has 3,037 supporters and appears in 9 languages.

Hong Kong: Shared widely Amnesty International’s report on the “intensifying crackdown on independent labour organizations”.

Sweden: We will be launching a new campaign this week, probably today.

USA: We gave extensive publicity to the passing of Richard Trumka on Thursday. In addition, Eric’s weekly column for Solidarity is about this.

Bookshop: One day after doing a mailing to our English list promoting the book Dying for an iPhone, there were 91 views on our UK and US bookshops, but no sales.

Correspondents: We resumed regular mailings to LabourStart’s nearly 1,000 correspondents.

LabourStart Jobs: We got our new domain to work, but are still waiting on final revisions for the site’s logo before we go fully live.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by just 46 this week.

Since last Wednesday we’ve had a very busy week …

Chile: We’ve had full coverage of the strike at the world’s largest copper mine, and have publicised that fact across social media.

Egypt: We’ll be exploring the possibility of new campaign with our friends at the CTUWS.

Europe: We’ve continued running with the Fedex/TNT campaign for at least another month, at the request of the ETF.

Hungary: We expect to shortly launch a campaign in support of workers who’ve been forbidden to strike – at the request of the European Transport Workers’ Federation.

Kazakhstan: We closed the campaign in all languages, but may need to do another as the issues have not been resolved.

Malawi: We added a new correspondent from the journalists’ union.

Romania: Our mailing list in Romanian grew by several hundred due to the campaign we’re running in support of Bucharest metro workers.

Sweden: We’ve responded favourably to the request for a campaign and are expecting something quite soon.

Adding news: We’ve cleaned up the pages where correspondents add news, dropping a lot of extraneous material.

Book of the month: We’ve started promoting a book of the month — on our home page, across social media and soon, in a mailing. The authors of ‘Dying for an iPhone‘ are delighted.

Campaigns: We’ve shared a piece Derek wrote — Ten Reasons Why Unions Should Use LabourStart for Online Campaigns — on our home page.

Country news: Our country news page was not rendering correctly on small screens (like smartphones); this has now been fixed.

Donations: We followed up with appeals to several global unions, and BWI committed to a donation again this year.

Internationalisation: Our Hebrew home page had many problems, with far too much English and texts aligning on the wrong side of the page — all of this now fixed this week, as we move to other languages one by one.

LabourStart Jobs: We continue to make progress on this — it’s now multilingual and we’ve two designs for logos, and have registered the domain name labourstartjobs.org. Still working on this.

Today in Labour History: We had problems with character encoding which were screwing up the display of non-English texts — now fixed, as you can see on our home page.

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.

Note the massive growth in our Romanian list, the result of the Bucharest Metro workers campaign.

Mailing Lists:

The top 10:

English: 75499-74611

French: 7778-7728

German: 5839-5833

Spanish: 5209-5132

Turkish: 4233-4228

Korean: 3299-3296

Italian: 3223-3238

Russian: 2703-2714

Norwegian: 2210-2244

Dutch: 1527-1520

The others:

Arabic:  823-817

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 950-963

Creole:  11

Czech: 64-63

Danish: 96-99

Esperanto: 172-167

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  489-490

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  309-307

Hindi:  34

Hungarian:  186-194

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 396-397

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 861-860

Portuguese: 1342-1309

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  1772-39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 979-989

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12-14

LabourStart Correspondents:  645-640

LabourStart Translators:  87

Flickr:

834 members.

10190-10176 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  14450-16535

LabourStart.org page follows: 13557-14433

Global Labour News and Information: 8906-8926

LabourStart UK:  2107-2115

LabourStart Francophone: 589-593

LabourStart Brasil:  506-551

LabourStart Turkce:  2140-2136

LabourStart TV: 451

LabourStart Israel: 149 (new April 2021)

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2359-2325 members.

Page: 71-65 follows.

Twitter:

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

Global English: 28004-27423

Canada English: 16455-15922

Global Spanish: 5831-5732

USA: 5554-5603

Australia: 5422-5356

Portuguese: 5038-5000

Canada French: 2907-2747

Russian: 46-48 (reactivated March 2021)

Hebrew:  38-30 (new April 2021)

Italian: 498-503 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 342-344 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 349-350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 226-228 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120-122 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21-20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

We’re back to weekly updates.

Europe: We’ve asked again to close the Fedex/TNT campaign, which has been running for more than five months and we expect to do so later this week. We don’t know yet what the effect of the campaign has been.

Jordan: At the request of the Education International, we have now closed this campaign — our largest of 2021 with 9,643 supporters. The EI told us: “The outcome was great with the release of the vice President of the Jordanian Teachers Association (JTA) Dr. Nasser Al-Nawasra, declared innocent by the appeal court in Amman last Sunday 11 July as shared previously … We will keep pressure on the Jordanian government in order to reinstate the union.”

Kazakhstan: Our long-running Kazakhstan campaign is also closing this week, though we haven’t yet had the result we wanted.

Ukraine: After ten months, and with no results reported to us, we suspend the Ukraine miners’ campaign.

Fundraising: We did some followup work the European federations two of which have already made generous donations this year – and we expect more.  We continue to receive generous donations from Canadian unions, both national and local.

Interns: It’s looking increasingly likely that we will have one or more student interns from Canada, starting in September.

LabourStart Jobs: Expect more news about this in the coming days – for now, correspondents should note that there’s an option to tag stories which advertise jobs in the labour movement as such. We’ve always posted such stories, but have never collected them in one place, nor made it this easy to tag them.

This long-delayed report covers quite a bit of time — more than ten weeks. And it’s been a very busy ten weeks at that. This will be concise, but from next week I hope to resume regular weekly updates which can feature some more details. So here, basically, are the headlines since 10 May …

Campaigns: We launched quite a few, and even won some. These included campaigns in support of tobacco workers in the USA (in partnership with FLOC and the IUF), Thailand (with IndustriALL), Metro workers in Bucharest, Romania (with ETF and EPSU), Brazil, Colombia, and more. We also closed campaigns in Albania, India, Israel, Algeria and Ukraine. The last two were victories — our brother Mourad in Algeria was released from jail, and Profbud reached agreement with the employer in Ukraine. We’ve also had a partial win in Turkey, as Cihan has been released from jail but ordered to remain in the country to stand trial (that campaign continues).

Webinars: We held two excellent webinars in June, with several hundred participants. These focussed on Colombia and Brazil, and were closely tied to campaigns we launched in support of workers in both countries. Both the webinars and the campaigns have helped to raise the profile of our work in Latin America. We also reached out to the RWDSU in the USA to get a webinar going around the Amazon organising effort, but that seems to have stalled.

Publications: Dan Gallin’s new book Resistance was published and we’ve promoted it widely, including a limited time offer of free versions on Kindle. We have begun work on a 2022 Global Labour Calendar, our first in many years. We have also been working on a long-overdue edition of our Campaigning Online and Winning book.

Interns: The intern we were expecting to begin employing in mid-June was not available to us. Meanwhile, we are working on getting one or more interns from Canadian universities.

Fundraising: We did our annual appeal in mid-June, followed up by mailings about the release of Mourad and Cihan. We also did our first Facebook fundraiser, meeting our target this week. We’ve received generous donations in the last couple of months from IndustriALL, EPSU and ETF, and have reached out to other global unions and European federations. In addition, we have had tremendous support from a number of Canadian unions.

Outreach: We were approached by a team of academics in Canada who are doing “a research project which focuses on technology-driven innovation for the labour movement”. Eric had a two-hour interview with them, and Derek will soon be invited as well.

Fixes and changes to LabourStart: We are always making small changes, but in recent days have begun to attack a very long to-do list of suggested changes. We have now sorted out the country news pages for countries which have changed their names so that you will automatically see a link to the alternate name (e.g., Burma / Myanmar) — for the moment, this works only in English. We also fixed a problem with tweeting campaigns not in English and this seems to be working.

Blue skies: One project just beginning will be the tagging of news stories if these concern jobs in the labour movement. We often have such stories and we will find a way to show them in one place for people looking for such jobs — at no cost to the unions.

May started off with a bang, as we hosted a global event on Zoom on 2 May with speakers from the embattled trade union movements in Hong Kong, Myanmar, Turkey and Belarus. We also received a video from Iran, which we were unable to show on the day. The video of our event is live here. It has been seen by 213 people. Over 500 trade unionists registered to participate in our event. For the first time, we actually commissioned a logo, which has been shared widely:

We also completed the publication of the new book of essays by Dan Gallin, Resistance. The book is already available for sale from Amazon and we will begin promotion shortly.

We’ve also been working on a number of new campaigns:

• Algeria: We launched a campaign last week at the request of PSI. The campaign already has 3,480 supporters and has been translated into a number of languages.
• Hong Kong: We are in discussions with the HKCTU about ways we can help, including a global campaign.
• India: A new campaign has been proposed and we’re working to coordinate a response with local and global unions.
• Malaysia: We are supporting BWI’s new campaign by sharing their link across social media and our news page.
• Myanmar: We’re in discussions about the possibility of organising a global campaign as well helping (again) with fundraising.
• Turkey: We’re just about to go live with a campaign in support of a jailed Canadian trade unionist in Turkey.

USA: And finally, we’re discussing the possibility of a global webinar with the RWDSU on the struggle to unionise Amazon. Details coming soon.

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 experiencing significant growth are in bold.

We continue to see the effects of the EU’s GDPR.  While several major 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: 74611-74774

French: 7728

German: 5833-5844

Spanish: 5132-5155

Turkish: 4228

Korean: 3296-3294

Italian: 3238

Russian: 2714-2723

Norwegian: 2244-2254

Dutch: 1520

The others:

Arabic:  817

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 963

Creole:  11

Czech: 63-65

Danish: 99

Esperanto: 167-165

Farsi:  212

Finnish:  490

Georgian:  138

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  307

Hindi:  34-35

Hungarian:  194-190

Indonesian:  433

Japanese: 397-395

Malaysian: 6

Polish: 860

Portuguese: 1309

Punjabi:  2

Romanian:  39

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 989-1002

Tagalog: 159

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 306

Vietnamese:  21

InternaL:

Executive:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  640-627

LabourStart Translators:  87

Flickr:

834 members.

10176-10160 photos.

Facebook Pages/Groups:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  16535-13519

LabourStart.org page follows: 14433-14422

Global Labour News and Information: 8926-8861

LabourStart UK:  2115-2131

LabourStart Francophone: 593

LabourStart Brasil:  551-507

LabourStart Turkce:  2136-2171

LabourStart TV: 451-465

LinkedIn:

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

Group: 2325-2320-members.

Page: 65-61 follows.

Twitter:

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

Global English: 27423-27311

Canada English: 15922-15518

Global Spanish: 5732-5639

USA: 5603-5622

Australia: 5356-5104

Portuguese: 5000-4781

Canada French: 2747-2752

Russian: 48-44 (reactivated March 2021)

Hebrew:  30-23 (new last month)

Italian: 503-504 (last tweet June 2019)

Swedish: 344-349 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 350 (last tweet 2015)

French: 228-229 (last tweet 2018)

German: 122 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 20 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)