Inside LabourStart

Belarus: We continue to ramp up activities in the run up to the 16 April global day of solidarity. This week we publicised our interview with the ITUC’s Luc Triangle. As of this morning, it has been downloaded 104 times.  Our campaign has grown to 4,150 supporters and appears in 14 languages.

Iran: We’ve been invited to speak at an online May Day event organised by emigre groups (on 24.4).  More details soon.

Thailand: With the permission of IndustriALL, we closed our YPC campaign this week.  The campaign had 4,930 supporters and appeared in 16 languages. The campaign did not result in a victory for the workers, unfortunately.

Turkey: It looks like we will launch a new campaign shortly. Meanwhile, Kivanc has a great article in Labor Notes about the Telus struggle.  We’ll be sending out a special mailing to our Canadian list about this.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 90 new subscribers this week, due to new campaign supporters being added — mostly to the English list.

Android app: We are now in discussions with two developers about this, and are exploring a “no-code” solution as well.

 

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 7000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.

Our first podcast to break the 500 downloads mark dropped in March, an interview with the President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees regarding his union’s reaction to Trump’s threat to ‘annex’ Canada.

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected but growth has returned.  Spanish has displaced German as our third-largest list.

Our two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 15,301, up from 13.2k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 297 to 353.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

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

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

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

3807 (123 per day)-2927 (105 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

The top 10:

English: 85126-84862

French: 7089-7075

Spanish: 5566-5553

German: 5522-5511

Turkish: 4503-4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2828-2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 2003-1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  770-763

Belarusian:  299-288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 965-964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  611

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10351-10337

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  133-135

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (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: 2640-2634

Page: 322-317

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark in January.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 533 downloads: Interview with Mark Hancock, President of the Canadian Union of Public Employees re. the union’s recently-adopted “Montreal Declaration” which was drafted in response to US President Donald Trump’s threats against Canada.
2. 424-423 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
3. 321-320 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 16.5k-15301

Canada-English-language: 378-353

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36303-36431

Canada English: 20202-20949

Global Portuguese: 9925-9956

Global Spanish: 10247-10265

Australia: 9422-9702

USA: 4683-4708

Canada French: 3101-3107

Russian: 50

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (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): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

Podcasts: We launched one new podcast this week (Nilufar Mammadrzayeva from Labor Desk in Azerbaijan) and recorded another to be released next week (Luc Triangle from the ITUC on Belarus).  Meanwhile our interview with Mark Hancock from CUPE (Canada) is our most popular one so far, with 529 downloads.  See all our podcasts here.

Social media: We went live with our WhatsApp channel which is starting with 20 subscribers.  I would not be surprised if this soon grows to be larger than our Telegram channel with its 134 subscribers.

Campaigns:  We’ve written to our partners for our five oldest campaigns and will soon be closing these.  We hope to launch our Azerbaijan campaign next week.

Donations: We received a very generous donation from EPSU this week.

Interns: We heard from the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labour Relations (USA) and they are keen for us to take on new interns.  We’ll begin interviewing candidates next week.  Meanwhile our current intern, Isabel, who also started as Cornell intern for us, will be finishing her work with LabourStart at the end of this month.

The best news this week: Following a LabourStart campaign, our brother Ismet Aslan from Turkey has been released from prison after 6 months. Read more here.

Campaigns: We launched three new campaigns in the last two weeks.

• Our Belarus campaign grew to 3,098 supporters — a gain of 79 this week.
• Our Nike campaign grew to 2,197, a gain of about 1,450 this week.
• And our newest campaign, in support of striking workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in New York, grew to 2,336, a gain of 766 this week.

Next campaign: Next week we are likely to launch a new campaign in support of jailed trade unionists in Azerbaijan. Stay tuned.

Podcasts: Our most recent podcast, Pat Bulmer’s interview with the president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Mark Hancock, has been downloaded over 470 times in the last 8 days. It is our most successful podcast after, reaching a much wider audience than usual. We hope that this will get more people to subscribe to our podcasts, and to check out the podcasts we have already done.

News: Our correspondents posted over 3,500 news stories on LabourStart in March, averaging close to 128 per day.

Donations: We were very pleased to receive another generous donation from our friends at the International Union of Foodworkers (IUF).

A very busy week at LabourStart as we launched two new campaigns, a new podcast, and our brand-new LabourStart-branded mugs and t-shirts.

Campaign Number 1: USA: Support striking workers at Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas. This campaign went live on Thursday and has already been translated into several languages. In its first 24 hours online it picked up 1,570 supporters.

Campaign Number 2: Nike: Women workers demand justice. Launched this morning and had over 750 supporters in the first few hours. Campaign is live in English, Spanish and Turkish.

Campaign Number 3: Belarus: Stop repression, free jailed trade unionists. Launched a bit more than a week ago, the campaign now appears in 13 languages and has 3,019 supporters — a gain of about 1,200 this week.

Podcasts: This week Pat Bulmer interviewed the National President of Canada’s largest union, CUPE. The interview is exceptionally good — and has had a great response. It is shaping up to be what is possibly our most popular podcast, and it will be aired on radio stations in both the USA and Australia too.

T-shirts and mugs: Working together with the Trade Union Football & Alcohol Committee in the UK, we have produced these lovely items for sale. Check them out here.

News: And meanwhile, our volunteer correspondents have posted, on average, 128 news stories every day so far in March. That’s a huge increase since February, when they were posting about 104 stories per day.

Belarus: Our new campaign is now live and translations are pouring in. As fo 14:00 GMT today, the campaign (in English only) had 1,825 supporters — that’s after just one day online. Eric’s article on Belarus was widely circulated and will help to raise awareness of the campaign.

Nike: Our campaign in support of Asian women who work for Nike is going live in the next day or two. This is our first partnership with Global Labor Justice.

Other campaigns: We may be shortly launching a campaign in support of striking workers in the US. Details soon.

Swag: We have found a good, left-wing, unionised provider in the UK and are aiming to get new t-shirts, mugs and maybe caps ready in the next few weeks. We sold 597 of our previous t-shirts, earning £4,250 and hope to raise the same amount — or more — with the new products.

Podcasts: It looks like our next interviews will be with a leading Canadian trade unionist and with the people organising an international conference on strikes taking place later this month. (We will also interview some of the participants in that conference.). If you have any suggestions for people for us to interview, please get in touch!

Donations: We continue to be impressed with support from many individuals but also from their unions. We’ve received generous donations in the last few weeks from IndustriALL global union, the Education International, BCGEU (Canada) and Styrke (Norway).

Mailing lists: The lists continue to grow as new campaigns bring in new supporters. We added 67 new subscribers to the lists just before going live with our Belarus campaign — which will no doubt bring in more.

 

What follows is a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and we have passed the 5,000 downloads mark.  Older episodes continue to see new downloads, suggesting that the word is still getting out about the series.  This despite no concerted push to get the word out in the last month.

We continue to see changes in the mailing lists as the problems that resulted from several mailing service provider changes are corrected.

Last December we started reporting on the global English-language Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just two Blusky accounts:  The global account and an English-language Canadian news feed are active now but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

The two Bluesky accounts are managed in much different ways.  Sporadic efforts were made the increase the followers of the global accounts which now stands at 15,301, up from 13.2k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 297 to 353.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to our followers abandoning the platform for Bluesky and perhaps Mastodon.

Our other numbers remain fairly stable.

THE NUMBERS:

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

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

STORIES POSTED TO OUR NEWS SITE IN THE LAST MONTH:

2927 (105 per day)-3237 (104 per day)

MAILING LISTS:

The lists are being rebuilt after some technical hiccups so the numbers can be expected to fluctuate considerably over the next month or two.

Due to a technical problem I was unable to update our list numbers this month.

The top 10:

English: 84862

French: 7075

German: 5511

Spanish: 5553

Turkish: 4460

Korean: 3197

Italian: 2824

Russian: 2677

Norwegian: 1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437

The others:

Arabic:  763

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172

Indonesian:  385

Japanese: 382

Lithuanian:  62

Malaysian: 20

Polish: 964

Portuguese: 1274

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive:  12

Interns and Past Interns:  15

LabourStart Correspondents:  611

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838

Photos:  10337-10338

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  135-136

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  14k, details unavailable

Global Labour News and Information: 9.2k

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (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: 2634-2637

Page: 317-315

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark in January.  By labour podcast standards this is considered more than reasonable given the effort required.

LabourStart is a member of the US-based Labor Radio / Podcast Network.

Our latest pod, an interview with Liza Merliak re. the situation in Belarus, was posted only a week ago and already has 191 downloads.

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. 423-420 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 320-318 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 302-301 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed mid-November.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.  A Canadian English-language feed was added in late December.

Our Mastodon experience, as with most people’s, was not great as the initial excitement wore off quite quickly.  That does not appear to be happening with Bluesky.

No concerted effort was made to grow either account last month.

Global English-language: 15301-13.2k

Canada-English-language: 353-297

X (TWITTER as-was):

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  If we wish to maintain our footprint we will have to start doing so again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.  Whether that is possible is another question given the current flight of users from the platform.

We experienced decline in all accounts except the Australian, which grew slightly.  Prior to the exodus to Bluesky all would have usually experienced slow growth without any effort on our part.  This is almost certainly the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 36431-3636639

Canada English: 20949-21170

Global Portuguese: 9956-9999

Global Spanish: 10265-10289

Australia: 9702-9637

USA: 4683-4708

Canada French: 3107-3119

Russian: 50-60

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (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): 28 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

International Women’s Day: First of all, greetings to all working women from LabourStart! Our Working Women’s news page is absolutely full of news this year – check it out: https://www.labourstart.org/women/

Belarus: We are almost certainly going ahead with a campaign in the next few weeks. We also shared our interview with Liza, which went live this week — it already had 175 downloads, which is the same as last year’s interview. It will certainly reach a much larger audience this year.

Podcast interviews: We continue to search for interviewees, including folowing up with trade union leaders who have already agreed to do this.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations has asked if we want more interns this coming all. We said yes.

Young workers: Our Young Workers news page now has a “toolkit” for young trade unionists (mostly for the USA).

Swag: We’re looking for partners to help us produce and sell LabourStart branded products like t-shirts and mugs. Finding ones that are unionised is harder than you’d think. One UK-based company which initially looked like a good fit — “Certified Organic Products; Powered by Renewable Energy; Circular Design” — whose customers included a wide range of progressive charities and NGOs turns out to have a non-union workforce, which is a deal-breaker for us.

International Union Rights: We are probably going to try again to promote sales of this excellent journal, in a partnership with ICTUR. Apparently, it did quite well last time for them and for us.

Instagram: We have our first reel (video) and it’s gotten quite a few views (256). This is quite good considering that we only have 689 followers on the platform.

Fund-raising: Another generous donation from a Norwegian union arrived this week.

Inside LabourStart: We’ve had to disable the mailing list plugin for this blog as it had stopped working properly. We’ll find new ways of letting people know when the blog is updated.

 

 

 

 

Campaigns: Our Telus campaign in Turkey grew by just 130 new supporters this week. The launch of the French language version will help, but this campaign is still far too small and comrades are encouraged to promote it more widely. We have several other campaigns in the pipeline.

Podcasts: Our third podcast of the year, with Kivanç Eliaçik, is already our most popular this year, with 200 downloads so far. Today we interviewed Liza Merliak from Belarus for our 4th podcast of the year, going live in the next few days.

News: In the first 27 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted on average 104 news stories per day, a small decline compared to earlier in the month. But the number of volunteer correspondents posting news has grown by 26% since the end of 2024. Last week we did our second regular, monthly mailing to correspondents — this has helped to increase the involvement of some.

Fundraising: We’ve asked for help from the e-campaigning community in finding a PayPal alternative, which we could use in addition to PayPal. As we reported earlier, our supporters in New Zealand can’t use PayPal to donate to us, and other issues have come up in other countries.

Campaigns: We launched our first campaign of 2025 — in support of Telus workers in Turkey. As of today, the campaign appears in 13 languages and has 3,089 supporters.

Podcasts: We posted our third podcast of 2025, an interview with Kivanç Eliaçik, Director of International Relations Department for DISK. It is already the most popular podcast we did this year. We are hoping to record and share another podcast next week. In addition, one of our volunteers is readying our first long-form podcast.

News: In the first 21 days of February, our volunteer correspondents posted 2,253 new stories, an average of 107 per day.

Webinar: Three members of the LabourStart Executive spoke at the recent webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes”. We were informed that half of the participants — perhaps more — came due to the publicity we did for the event.

Syria: We had an online meeting with three leaders of the union of teachers in north and east Syria and followed this up by email.

Instagram: We revived our account there, and have gone up from 596 followers to 662, an increase of 11%.

Fundraising: We discovered that supporters in New Zealand have been unable to donate using PayPal and have changed our page to reflect this. We are now looking into alternatives.

Women workers at Nike: We supported the campaign launched by Global Labor Justice and managed to increase the number of pledged supporters by nearly 60%.

YoungWorkers.org: We publicly launched this new site this week with posts to social media and a mention in our mass mailing to the English list.

Mailings: We picked up 139 new subscribers this week, many of them for our Turkish list.