Inside LabourStart

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.

 

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Podcasts: We posted our second podcast of 2025 this week (interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn) and recorded our third — an interview with our own Kivanc from DISK Turkey, which will go live next week. Our 30.1 interview with Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage has already been downloaded 155 times in its first week online, which is already more popular than six of our earlier interviews. Our most popular podcast was downloaded 421 times.

Campaigns: We are just about to launch our first campaign of 2025 — possibly as early as today — with a couple more in the pipeline.

News: Our correspondents posted 817 news stories in the first 7 days of this month, or 117 news stories per day. The average number of news stories posted each day continues to rise. We wrote to all 858 inactive correspondents; as a result, a couple asked to be removed from the database, while others asked to be given new passwords. We will continue efforts to get our existing correspondents to be active, while also recruiting new ones.

Webinar: We are supporting the webinar on “Trade union struggles in authoritarian regimes” taking place next week. Three members of the LabourStart Executive will be speaking at the event. We did a dedicated mass mailing to promote the webinar and extensive publicity across social media, as well as making it our top priority global news story.

ICTUR: Following up on our podcast interview with ICTUR’s Daniel Blackburn, we had a meeting with him to discuss future collaboration with LabourStart. In the past, we partnered with ICTUR to promote their journal International Union Rights, and may do so again this year.

Syria: We have a call scheduled for next week with a teachers’ union in northern and eastern Syria. This is our first contact with Syrian trade unionists, who reached out to us.

Instagram: We’re going to resume promoting our content on Instagram as our old/new intern Isabel will be taking this on. We have 596 followers on Instagram and can grow this number if we make an effort.

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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 13.2k, up from 9.4k.  The Canadian English-language account went from 104 to 297.

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

Flickr numbers are down slightly as the group was purged of appropriate content and contributors.

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:

3237 (104 per day)-2196 (71 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: 84862-84860

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:  611-608

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69

Donors:  885

FLICKR:

Members:  838-840

Photos:  10338-10354

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  136-132

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: 2637

Page: 315-316

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark last month.  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. 420-418 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 318 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 301-299 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: 13.2k-9.4k

Canada-English-language: 297-104

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.  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: 36639-37049

Canada English: 21170-21516

Global Portuguese: 9999-10086

Global Spanish: 10289-10373

Australia: 9637

USA: 4708-4744

Canada French: 3119-3189

Russian: 60-49

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.

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Podcasting: Our first podcast interview this year has gone live (thanks Pat!), a second one has been recorded and a third interview is scheduled for Monday. We are on course for one podcast interview every week in 2025, which will be great. This week we also fixed a bug — all the non-English LabourStart home pages were showing a wrong link for the podcasts. (Thanks Espen for pointing this out.)

Campaigns: We have several in the pipeline, including in Turkey, Thailand, Myanmar and Liberia. More details soon.

Fundraising: All the translations of our fundraising message have gone out, but the total income has not increased significantly. We will do a followup mailing to the English list which should help.

Next generation: We held a meeting with former interns and have begun work on a Young Workers news page. One of our interns, Isabel, is back with us for three months, starting this week.

News: With well over 3,000 news stories posted this month, we’re averaging over 104 per day — a very big increase compared to the first nine days of January when the average was just 78 per day. The number of active correspondents is growing, up 15% compared to last month. Our goal is to increase the number of active correspondents three-fold this year, so we are on course.

Correspondents: We have a new form and it works. We signed up three new correspondents this week — from Georgia, Ireland and Spain. We also reached out again to our lists in South Africa and Ireland in an attempt to recruit more correspondents; other countries will follow now that we see the form is working.

News: We added about 720 news stories in the last week, which is a signficantly higher number per day than we were experiencing earlier this month. The number of active correspondents this month is up by 10% compared to last month and we expect that to grow.

Podcasting: We’ve lined up the first three podcasts for 2025, starting next week. Please suggest more names for people for us to interview — we want, if possible, to do one show every week.

Fundraising: In the last week, due to fundraising messages to our supporters, we raised £2,021.88. We also received a pledge of £2,809.22 from a union in Canada. We also received a €400 donation from a Danish union. So, a very good week for us. (But we also got our tax bill, which wipes out a lot of that gain.)

Next generation: We polled our former interns and will have our next online meeting next week.

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This week we did a lot of work to raise awareness of some of our needs — and we’d like to share some of that with you. Here are ways you can help LabourStart this week:

Signup to be a volunteer correspondent. But — this is important — our form seems to have stopped working. Give us a couple of days to figure this out and fix it.

If you are already a correspondent, please make sure to continue posting news stories. So far this month, you’ve posted over 1,500 news stories. If you don’t remember how to post, or lost your user ID or password, email us and we’ll fix it.

Campaigns. It’s time to launch a new one. Any ideas? Any contacts to share?

Podcasting. We’re keen to resume our series of podcast interviews. Let us know if you can suggest people we should be talking to — making sure to provide contact details.

Subscribe to this blog and get weekly updates from us. Fill in the box on the top right side of this page.

Thanks — and see you next week!

While many global union websites are slow to return to normal after the holidays, we’ve kept LabourStart going all the way through.

Android app: We have taken the first step to building an Android app for LabourStart. We expect this will take several months as there’s a steep learning curve. If successful, we will aim later in the year to create an iOS app as well. For many people, their phones (especially low-cost Android phones) are the way they connect to the net, so it is extremely important that we be accessible there as well.

News: In the first 9 days of 2025, our correspondents posted 705 stories — an average of 78 stories per day, or one every 18 minutes. This year we have set the goal to triple the number of active correspondents.

Recruiting new correspondents: We have sent out targetted emails to our South African (459) and Irish (1,722) lists. The latter received a message from us two days ago. So far, no new correspondents have signed up and we are checking to see if there’s a technical problem.

Inside LabourStart: This blog — which you’re reading right now — allows people to sign up to receive emails every time it is updated. Today we have 100 subscribers, nearly all of them our volunteer correspondents. We are going to increase the number of people receiving those updates and as a first step, we’ve added a sign-up box on the right side of this page.

LabourStart-branded merchandise: With our cool new logo, it’s time to make things like t-shirts and mugs available. We found a wonderful co-op in the USA which we could work with, but they need to sort out world-wide shipping first. We’re working on this.

Goals for 2025: In addition to the things mentioned above, in 2025 we will reduce our long-term to-do list (over 80 tasks, some quite old) by one per week on average. We’ll publish at least one book (we have three in the pipeline in draft form). We’ll continue our work with a new generation of activists. And we’ll fight hard for workers’ rights — everywhere in the world that they are threatened.

I am changing the format of the monthly reports.  Each will now have a brief summary of highlights followed by the usual long list of numbers.

SUMMARY:

Our new podcast service is picking up and this month we 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 publicize it in the last month.

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

Last month 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.

XTwitter feeds continue to decline.  Most or all of that can be attributed to progressives 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:

2196 (71 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: 84860-84800

French: 7075-7642

German: 5511-5503

Spanish: 5553-5979

Turkish: 4460-4367

Korean: 3197-3321

Italian: 2824-2819

Russian: 2677-2672

Norwegian: 1996

Romanian:  1730

Dutch: 1437-1536

 

The others:

Arabic:  763

Belarusian:  288

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964

Creole:  11

Czech: 58

Danish: 79

Esperanto: 187

Farsi:  164

Finnish:  439-438

Georgian:  176

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  172-169

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:  608

LabourStart Translators:  104

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69-51

Donors:  885

 

FLICKR:

Members:  840

Photos:  10354-10366 after cull of inappropriate contributions.

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  132-131

 

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-9188

LabourStart UK likes:  2.1k-2k, details unavailable

LabourStart Francophone: 620-607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 489-495

LabourStart Brasil:  552-550

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 465-462

LabourStart TV follows:  455

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Italia:  68

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 191-188

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: 2637-2636

Page: 316-318

 

PODCASTS:

We passed the 5000 downloads mark last month.  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. 418 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 318 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 299 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: 9.4k-5.9k, details unavailable.

Canada-English-language 104

 

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.  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: 37049-37321

Canada English: 21516-21637

Global Portuguese: 10086-10131

Global Spanish: 10373-10835

Australia: 9637-9695

USA: 4744-4805

Canada French: 3189-3199

Russian: 49

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.

It was a quiet week with most trade union offices closed — but it was also the week that Amazon and Starbucks workers made the news with unprecedented strike actions in different countries.

Georgia: The Evolution strikers proposed a new text for a new campaign, which we are discussing with them.

News: Despite a slowdown in labour news due to holiday season union office shutdowns, our correspondents have posted 1,969 links — about 73 news stories a day. Big thanks to Derek, Eric, Espen, Kyle and Pat for leading the way.

Norway: LO Oslo has now pledged a generous donation.

Urdu language campaigns: We are nearly there, just need to tweak some things on the landing page.

Podcasting: We will resume interviews in January. Derek and Pat have some ideas in Canada. If others have suggestions, please let me know. According to Buzzsprout, which hosts our podcasts, in 2024 we were in the top 25% of all podcasts and we had listeners in 117 countries. With a bit of a push we can probably make it to the top 10% in 2025.

Thailand campaign: Just eight days ago this was our smallest campaign with 3,842 supporters. It has picked up 982 new supporters in the last week and is 176 supporters shy of 5,000 today.

Turkey campaign: Slow growth this week as support rises by just 64. Ismet has been hospitalised and we’ve asked if we should use that to focus more attention on his situation.

Urdu: We’re making final tweaks to ensure that our campaigns display correctly in Urdu. For 70 million people, Urdu is a mother tongue and this is a big step forward for us.

Amazon: We contacted the union in New York City offering help again, but receive no reply yet. Meanwhile, we’ve shared UNI’s statement about Amazon strikes in the USA and Germany.

Mailing lists: Slow growth this week as we picked up just 35 new subscribers (24 of those for the English list).

Recruiting new correspondents: Our mailing last week to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa did not generate any response, even though 41 of those opened the message and 11 clicked on the link to become correspondents. We’ll be writing to those 11 next weekm to see if we can help them to sign up.