Inside LabourStart

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.

The news of the attempted fascist coup in Brazil was the focus of some work this week as we sought out, and found, statements by global unions and others and shared these very widely both on our news pages and across social media.

Inevitably, much of the work in the last week took place behind the scenes as we prepare for our upcoming Global Labour Conference in Tbilisi. In recent days we scheduled or held calls with global unions and other partners regarding content and participation. We also discussed with our Georgian partners the issue of a budget and logo. Work is nearly done on a registration form which will work in Georgian and English (and probably Russian as well).

We also had some luck with fundraising this week as our global union and European partners were once again generous in their donations to LabourStart.

Global Solidarity Conference: We had another meeting with the Georgian trade unions and agreed on a conference theme and the next practical steps.

Today in Labour History: This wonderful feature on our home page (the work mainly of Derek) doesn’t get enough attention. Today we promoted it across all our social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram and Mastodon.

Fundraising: We have reached out to all the global unions, including some which have never previously donated to us before, in an attempt to improve our financial situation as the new year begins.

Programming: We continue to fix things in the software that drives LabourStart.

A correspondent pointed out this week that one could not change the date of a new story to ‘2022’ — this has now been fixed.

In addition, the RSS newswire is now working correctly for German, French and Norwegian; previously only the Spanish version had been fixed. All the others will soon be working as well.

New Year’s Resolutions: We shared this graphic widely across social media:

 

 

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: 83067-82457

French: 7546-7523

German: 5842

Spanish: 5534-5505

Turkish: 4169

Korean: 3320

Italian: 3095

Russian: 2690

Norwegian: 2161

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1502

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 901

Creole:  11

Czech: 60

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 186-182

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:  668-666

LabourStart Translators:  91

Africa Caucus:  63

 

FLICKR:

Members:  838-839

Photos:  10007-9980

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  122-121

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

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

LabourStart.org page likes:  13723-13717

LabourStart.org page follows: 14678

Global Labour News and Information: 8940-8956

LabourStart UK likes:  page unavailable

LabourStart UK follows:  2171

LabourStart Francophone: 607-590 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500-496

LabourStart Brasil:  553-552

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443-447

LabourStart TV follows:  454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Nepal:  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: 2603

Page: 242-226

 

TWITTER:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these  accounts with the exception of the Global English account which received occasional attention.

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: 39076

Canada English: 23251-22962

Portuguese: 11060-11002

Global Spanish: 10468-10319

Australia: 10584-10581

USA: 5267-5300

Canada French: 3046-3061

Russian: 47

Hebrew:  48 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 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.

The final week of 2022 was destined to be a relatively quiet one as many union offices shut down for the holiday.

Nevertheless, we did a few things at LabourStart …

• We sent out an end-of-year mailing to all our correspondents. This encouraged them to contact us if they’re having difficulty logging in to post news, to help recruit new correspondents and to publicise our news page more widely.
• Our mailing lists grew this week as we added 52 more subscribers from the new campaign supporters.
• We did more work to publicise our Belarus campaign across social media. That campaign now has 7,938 supporters — a gain of 50 in the last week. We also shared widely the ITUC statement condemning the sentences handed down to the jailed leaders of the trade union movement in that country. (Unfortunately the ITUC has not yet translated the statement, so it’s only in English.)
• We continued work fixing LabourStart’s back-end. This week that included dealing with a bug in the caption for our photo-of-the-day feature, as well as problems with character encoding on our home page for some Spanish-language stories. We continued work creating new and fixed RSS feeds for a number of countries. Unfortunately, not all of these yet function correctly, but we’re continuing the work.
• We continued this week with discussions with our partners in Georgia in the run-up to our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference at the end of April.

In 2023 we’re looking forward to working harder and smarter to defend workers’ rights and rebuild union power all over the world. Thanks to all of you for all that you do — and happy new year!