Inside LabourStart

I have been in Georgia now for 11 days and have met with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation (GTUC) who are our partners for the event, as well as the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Solidarity Center, who are both providing generous assistance. We have 200 registrants at the moment — the number seems a bit lower than it was because we’ve actually had to remove quite a few duplicats, and a number of people registered but are not able to attend. The Georgian numbers are still quite low, but this will change as GTUC begins to invite its own members. We don’t have a proper agenda yet, but we have many workshop proposals and plenary speakers and an agreed timetable:

This will be a brief post as nearly all the work this week has focussed on our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference.  Some highlights:

The conference web page now appears in 4 languages – English, Georgian, Russian and Ukrainian.

As of this afternoon, there are 184 registrants from 59 countries — 155 of them from outside Georgia and 29 from Georgia.  We’ve picked up 42 new registrants this week. These numbers will grow in the next week, especially as we begin signing up Georgians in larger numbers.  We are also seeing more people volunteering to run workshops and speak at plenaries.  We hope to have a draft agenda ready in the next week or so.

On Sunday night, Eric Lee will travel to Georgia to spend two weeks working there.

We marked International Women’s Day with posts on social media and with our annual message to correspondents about how to tag stories so that they appear on our Working Women page, which was amended this year to feature Norwegian for the first time.

Meanwhile, our amazing volunteer correspondents continue to do great work sharing labour news from around the world.  They’ve posted 7,524 labour news stories since the start of the year.

More next week …

Global Solidarity Conference: This conference is continuing to attract new registrants and new ideas for content (workshops and plenary sessions). As of today, we have 142 people registered from 50 countries; of those 23 are from Georgia and 119 from abroad. We expect these numbers to grow siginificantly in the next few weeks. Eric will be in Georgia from 12 March for two weeks and will work closely with the Georgian Trade Union Confederation to ensure the conference’s success.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign had 6,242 supporters last week; this has grown to 6,704. We are still missing translations into some key languages, including German and French.

Donations: The Norwegian union Industri Energi has made another very generous donation to LabourStart.

Campaigns: With the agreement of the union in Canada (ACTRA), we have closed down the campaign there.

Mailing lists: Boosted by the Poland IKEA campaign, we added 319 new subscribers to our lists this week — with 209 of those going to the English list and the Polish list growing by 67.

Programming: We continue to make small improvements to the functioning of LabourStart. On the page showing which correspondents have posted news today, we used to show only the total number for this month — now it’s also showing the total for the whole year so far.  In the first two months of 2023, our volunteer correspondents posted over 6,500 news stories.

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.

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 83432-83088

French: 7546

German: 5930

Spanish: 5538-5534

Turkish: 4412

Korean: 3320

Italian: 3100-3095

Russian: 2690

Norwegian: 2180-2171

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1527-1502

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 186

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  472

Georgian:  141

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  180

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 953-842

Portuguese: 1290

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  669

LabourStart Translators:  91-93

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10067-10060

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  124-122

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13764-13723

Global Labour News and Information: 8944-8940

LabourStart UK likes:  2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500

LabourStart Brasil:  552-553

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443

LabourStart TV follows:  454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Nepal:  7-6 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

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

Group: 2600

Page: 249-247

 

TWITTER:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts, with the exception of the Canada-French account.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually grow even without any interventon.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Mastodon).

 

Global English: 40479-40338

Canada English: 23493-23517

Global Portuguese: 11206

Global Spanish: 10645-10633

Australia: 10658-10667

USA: 5251-5261

Canada French: 3267-3047

Russian: 47

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (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)

South Asia (English): 22 Placeholder and not yet active.

Global Solidarity Conference: We continue to sign up new people to attend. As of today, we have over 130 registrants from 44 countries — an increase of nearly 50% since last week. The conference website now appears in a Georgian language edition. We’ve now sent out the first weekly newsletter to conference registrants.

Poland IKEA campaign: This campaign has taken off in the last week. We currently have 6,242 supporters and the campaign appears in 12 languages.

Internationalisation: It turns out that we weren’t translating into French the names of all Canadian provinces, but this has now been fixed.

Kazakhstan campaign: As I reported last week, we have now closed this campaign after a very long time, and we’ve now received a report from the union which we can share.

 

 

Sorry to have missed a week, but here’s the news from LabourStart in the last two weeks (since 3 February):

New campaign: We launched a new campaign in support of Solidarnosc in Poland – one of their leaders at IKEA has been illegally sacked by the company. This campaign took off very quickly, with over 3,200 supporters in less than 24 hours. It is our first campaign in a few months and it looks like our supporters are keen to help.

Old campaigns: We closed our Marlboro campaign in Turkey (with the permission of DISK). We’ve also closed two very old campaigns in Kazakhstan and Pakistan after several unsuccessful attempts to get news from the unions. In generals our campaigns run for three months, no more. We don’t want ‘stale’ campaigns that no one signs up for on our home page – it sends the wrong message to employers and governments.

Global Solidarity Conference: This is now exactly ten weeks (70 days) away. Over 100 people have already registered and we have a conference website which are updating every day. Please register there if you’ve not yet done so, and please share that link widely. Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, has agreed to speak at the conference.

Correspondents: We have an ongoing problem with people signing up to be correspondents, and then never posting news. Last week, we fixed a script which shows all new correspondents in the last two years and we identified 13 of them as having never posted a news story — and then wrote to all 13 of them. This will be done regularly. We should not give up on people who may simply not know how, or have forgotten how to login.

Donations: We received a generous donation from EPSU, PSI’s European region.  Donations from our supporters are not has high as we would have liked because the mass mailing asking for donations has only gone out to a small number of lists.   We don’t yet have translations yet for some of our major languages including French, German, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian and Turkish.  All of those lists have 1,000 or more subscribers and it would be very helpful if we could get those translations done.

Canada: Pat Bulmer has replaced Derek Blackadder as our coordinator in Canada. Good luck, Pat and to Derek — thanks for decades of fantastic work there.

Global Solidarity Conference:

We had an online meeting with our Georgian partners, and also calls with several more officers and staff at various global unions.

Eric Lee will be visiting Tbilisi to work on the conference for two weeks in March.

If you’d like to attend the conference (28-30 April in Tbilisi, Georgia) please sign up here: https://www.labourstart.org/2023/register.html

Fundraising:

Our appeal went out in six more languages, reaching another 6,916 people.

But we have still not received translations for some of our larger mailing lists.

BWI has made a very substantial donation.

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.

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 83088-83067

French: 7546

German: 5930-5842

Spanish: 5534

Turkish: 4412-4169

Korean: 3320

Italian: 3095

Russian: 2690

Norwegian: 2171-2161

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1502

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 186

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  472

Georgian:  141

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  293

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  180

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 842

Portuguese: 1290

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

 

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  12

LabourStart Correspondents:  669-668

LabourStart Translators:  93-91

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10060-10007

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  125-122

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

I was unable to access Facebook on the date of this report.

 

LINKEDIN:

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

Group: 2600-2603

Page: 247-242

 

TWITTER:

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

Slow growth and losses, especially the USA account’s continuing decline, can be attributed to users’ response to Musk’s takeover of the site.

 

Global English: 40338-39076

Canada English: 23517-23251

Portuguese: 11206-11060

Global Spanish: 10633-10468

Australia: 10667-10584

USA: 5261-5267

Canada French: 3047-3046

Russian: 47

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508-507 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 335 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (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)

South Asia (English): 22 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

Global Solidarity Conference 2023: Much of the work in the last week has consisted of online meetings with leaders of global unions and others regarding content for the conference — and participants.  We have a growing list of likely workshops, many of which sound absolutely amazing.

We also have a logo (to the left).

Philippines campaign: We closed this after three months online; the campaign had 5,049 supporters.

We have asked the union for an update.

Fundraising: An appeal to our English list (and two other lists) netted about £2,000.

Translations have come in for some other languages and these will go out shortly.

 

We lost two good comrades last week, both of whom appeared at LabourStart conferences in recent years — Shane Enright in the UK and Myrtle Witbooi in South Africa.

Shane, who had been on the staff of the ITF, worked for Amnesty International UK and was in charge of the trade unions, where he did exemplary work over years.  Among other things, he arranged for our 2008 LabourStart conference in London to be hosted at the Amnesty headquarters.

Myrtle was the inspiring leader of the domestic workers movement, first in South African and later as President of the International Domestic Workers Federation.  She gave a memorable speech at LabourStart’s 2014 Global Solidarity Conference in Berlin and also spoke at our online International Women’s Day event last year.

May their memory be blessed.

In other news …

Global Solidarity Conference: Last week we had good calls with leaders of two global unions, and there’s a call next week with another. We’re getting very good feedback on the conference. Meanwhile, we now have a logo and a working registration form in English and Georgian, and we have a page that shows all registrants.

Fundraising: We did an appeal to all LabourStart correspondents yesterday — so far, with minimal results.