Inside LabourStart

Derek Blackadder here. A minor celebration (I’m having caffeinated coffee for a change!) this morning as the English-language Canadian Twitter feed just passed the 5,000 followers mark.

It tweets automatically (I load Hootsuite each morning with stories from the Canada English-language page) once an hour starting at 0700 Eastern and continuing until 1900 Eastern 7 days a week.

Our French-language feed lags a bit numbers-wise at 887 so we’ll be putting on a bit of a push over the next while to get that past the 1,000 followers mark. It tweets once every 2 hours starting at 0800 and ending at 1800.

From what I have read the frequency of tweets is a significant (but not the only) factor in the followers that a feed picks up and so I’m trying to figure out if the French-language feed can move to once an hour as well.

This post, which will stay on top of Inside LabourStart for a while, will serve to update you about our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference in Toronto, which opens on 6 May 2016.  Questions about the conference? Email Canada@LabourStart.org.

D-108 – 19 January 2016: We’ll soon have a draft agenda and list of topics and speakers.  We’ve invited four prominent speakers from the USA, Canada, Mexico and South Africa.  We’re up to 256 people registered to attend the conference already. (more…)

Growth is indicated below in green, and declines in red.  The second number, where available, is from the previous quarter.

Android app downloads (totals)

First number is current, second number is total installs. The numbers in brackets are from the previous quarter.

English: 408 / 721 [428 / 686]
Norwegian: 37 / 43 [33 / 31]
Esperanto: 30 / 88 [28 / 76]

Total: 475 current installs [489]

Mailing lists

English: 85,588 – 85,962
French: 8,325 – 8,299
German: 5,785 – 5,793
Spanish: 5,448 – 5,462
Italian: 3,970 – 3,998
Turkish: 3,719 – 3,755
Korean: 3,068 – 2,996
Norwegian: 2,782 – 2,749
Russian: 2,433 – 2,384
Dutch: 1,774 – 1,775

Swedish: 1,256 – 1,239
Chinese: 1,103 – 1,103
Polish: 793 – 734
Finnish: 687 – 687
Japanese: 488 – 483
Arabic: 463 – 463
Portuguese: 416 – 373
Indonesian: 346 – 346
Hebrew: 282 – 282
Tagalog: 254 – 254
Farsi: 242 – 242

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 15,395 – 14,881
Canada English: 4,962 – 4,613
Canada French: 876 – 803
USA: 563 – 524
Italian: 421 – 330
Indonesia: 360 – 341
Swedish: 306 –
French: 229 – 225
German: 90 – 75
Spanish: 74 – 76
Portuguese: 47 – 8
Japanese: 21 – 21
Russian: 18 – 19

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 10,177 – 10,078
Members of LabourStart group: 8,611 – 8,526
Like LabourStart page (French): 483 – 478
Like LabourStart page (German): 447 – 433
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 169 – 165
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 148 – 145
Members of LabourStart Vostok [Russian] – 82

UnionBook

Members: 5,909 – 5,885

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,970 – 1,948

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 791 – 790 [updated numbers not available]

Website

Correspondents: 798 – 789

LabourStart.org (news)

Unique users – 22,366 – 18,711

Top countries (by sessions):

USA 29% – 27%
Canada 15% – 15%
UK 9% – 8%
India 5%
Australia 5% – 6%

Most popular pages – page views:

Home page – English 41,764 – 33,294
USA – English 13,941 – 14,883
Canada – English 6,294 –  6,543
Home page – Norwegian – 2,807 – 870
Home page – Indonesian 2,576 -1,401

LabourStartCampaigns.net (campaigns)

Unique users – 35,723 – 39,436

Top countries (by sessions):

UK 17% – 15%
Canada 16% – 19%
USA 14% – 15%
Germany 5% – 6%
Australia 5% – 5%

Most popular pages – page views:

UK: Support strikers at the National Gallery in London – 8,819
Estonia: Reinstate Sergey Mastepan – 8,493
Kyrgyzstan: Stop union-busting, reinstate Zhanaydar Ahmetov – 6,991
Korea: Stop attacks on trade unions now – 5,778
Libya: Protect female activists now! – 5,737

A summary of the latest news from LabourStart in the last 11 days … (more…)

I’ve been late with an update because of a family vacation, but here’s a brief update on the last 26 days at LabourStart. (more…)

Derek Blackadder here.

I spoke in Vancouver at a fringe event at the convention of the Confederation of Canadian Unions, the smallest of the 4 central labour bodies here. About 160 present. I had about an hour, including time for questions, on the theme of ‘LabourStart Behind the Scenes: what we do, how we do it and how we can help’. (more…)

This report was drafted by Martina and edited by Eric. Comments are open — please feel free to make comments and ask questions below.

The LabourStart Retreat had the character of a working meeting. Presentations by Dan Gallin, Martina Hartung, Eric Lee and Gisela Neunhoeffer prepared the basis for discussions and we worked concretely on specific subjects in working groups or in a World Café format. This mix of presentation and discussion enabled the successful integration of all participants on all subjects and the result wasa detailed and concrete future action plan. Unfortunately, one speaker had to cancel due to illness in the short term. Besides that, there weren’t any further changes to the program. (more…)

Most of the work in the last 13 days has focussed on campaigns:

• We launched a new campaign at the request of the ITF, in support of workers in Estonia.
• We’re keeping our Turkey/Mulberry campaign live at the moment at the request of IndustriALL pending some developments there.
• I wrote to Sharan Burrow at the ITUC offering our help in growing the joint campaign with the ILO “50 for Freedom”. She replied and is happy to have our help.
• We gave extensive publicity to the IUF’s new PepsiCo campaign on our home page, to our mailing lists, and on social media.
• We received a campaign request from WAC Ma’an in Israel; this is on hold pending developments in the region and we also await a reply from the Histadrut.
• We gave publicity to an IFJ campaign in support of kidnapped media workers in Yemen on social media.
• I completed work on the new Translations Dashboard which is being used by our volunteer translators. It shows who is translating our campaigns, and prevents duplication of effort.

In other news … (more…)

In the last 3 weeks …

Massacre in Ankara:

Upon hearing the news on Saturday morning from our comrades in DISK, we mobilized correspondents to post many news stories, to translate some of them from English, and to encourage global unions to issue statements, many of which have done so. (more…)

by Derek Blackadder

The following is a section of my regular column (Webwork) in the Canadian labour magazine Our Times. Eric thought it might be of interest and so…

ON HIS WAY TO THE EDUCATION International World Congress in Ottawa in July, Iranian teachers’ union leader Esmail Abdi was arrested by the Iranian police; detained without charge; likely tortured; and almost certainly thinking about the fate of his predecessor, Farzad Kamangar, who was executed after a trial lasting seven minutes. (more…)