Inside LabourStart

Interns: We have now completed interviewing all 6 candidate interns from the Cornell ILR school; we will select 2 of them for fall internships next week.  Thanks to Penny and Derek for helping to interview all the candidates.

Campaigns: We reached out to our partners on the 4 active campaigns asking for updates that we can share. We’ve gotten two positive responses so far. This is important and we don’t always do this.

Problem with reaching LabourStart from Google in the USA: Two intern candidates pointed this out, possibly after searching Google for “LaborStart”. We think we identified the problem and have fixed it, but if anyone still has difficulty, please let us know.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew by 44 this week, with the largest number for the Azerbaijani list. But most of those are people already on our Turkish list, so we probably shouldn’t have them on both lists.

Canada: We had a good meeting with the International Solidarity committee of the BCGEU.  Thanks to Derek and Pat for playing an active part in this.

USA: We reached out to the UFW offering help with a campaign, but have not yet heard back. The Solidarity Center did get back to us with a response to our offer to help them.

 

This week we were able to focus on two major events on the labour calendar around the world: International Workers’ Memorial Day and May Day. Our coverage of both events was exemplary, with hundreds of stories posted.

In the run up to May Day, Eric was invited to be on a panel with Iranian emigre activists focussing on workers’ struggles in the Islamic Republic. Here is what he said.

We created a shortlist of six students from Cornell University who have applied to be interns this coming fall. We will interview them all next week. Thanks to Derek, Penny and Isabel for helping to review all the applicant submissions.

And a special thanks to Isabel who has now completed her second internship with LabourStart.

Our mailing lists continue to grow, picking up 159 new subscribers this week — mostly for the English list.

And finally, we signed up one new correspondent from the USA and have just received an application from another one, in Nigeria.

Azerbaijan campaign: This now appears in 11 languages with more on the way, and has 2,876 supporters. That number will grow as mailings in the additional languages go out, and following a reminder message to the English list going out later today. This is our first campaign to appear in Azeri and we now have a (small) mailing list for the first time in that language. We got some wonderful publicity about the campaign on this important news site covering the South Caucasus region: International labour movement launches campaign to free detained labour activists in Azerbaijan

Turkey (teachers) campaign: This appears in 13 languages and already has 3,265 supporters which is expected to grow significantly for the same reasons mentioned above.

Alamo Cinema campaign: The union sent us this – “Labourstart proved to be a helpful ally during our strike and we appreciate the work they do and they support they give.” We will share this with our supporters today.

Iran: Yesterday Eric Lee spoke on a panel on a dissident, pro-democracy Iranian TV channel (broadcasting from outside the country). Among other participants in the event was teacher trade unionist Esmail Abdi, who was subject of more than one LabourStart campaign following his arrests.

Interns: Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labour Relations has found 14 students to apply to be a LabourStart correspondent this fall. We have reviewed the applications and created a shortlist of six and will begin interviews next week.

Podcasts: We interviewed US trade unionist Debbie Goldman who has written a book, Disconnected, about organising call centre workers in the US. That interview already has a significant number of downloads even though we haven’t really done a lot of publicity yet. Our podcast page on Buzzsprout now features a significantly longer “podroll” than before. If anyone wants to suggest other union podcasts to include here, please let us know.

USA: We wrote to the Solidarity Center, which has brought legal action against the Trump administration for cutting off their funds, offering to help in any way we can, and reminding them how helpful the Solidarity Center was with our most recent Global Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi.

Donors: We have just under 1,000 people on our new donors’ mailing list, and are regularly sending them updates which are NOT appeals for more money. One of these updates went out earlier this week.

 

It’s been a busy week.

Azerbaijan campaign: This has now gone live in English and Azerbaijani versions. We will send it out for translation into more languages on Monday.

Belarus campaign: LabourStart activists participated in the ITUC-hosted webinar to mark the global day of action. We reached out to all participants and managed to get commitments from several to boost awareness of the campaign. We also got translations done into Polish and Romanian. This is our largest current campaign with 4,374 supporters.

New York City Alamo campaign: This ended in a victory for the workers, which we shared on our news page, across social media and in a mass mailing. Our campaign has now been shut down.

Nike campaign: We closed this down after Global Labor Justice gave us permission to do so. The results of the campaign were somewhat disappointing.

Turkey – teachers campaign: This campaign also went live this week, in English and translations have now begun coming in.

Turkey – Telus/TikTok campaign: We did a dedicated mailing to our Canadian list (Telus is a Canadian company).

Older campaigns: We’ve closed down all the remaining campaigns from 2024. In most cases, unfortunately, the campaign partners did not respond to our messages, so we don’t know the results of our effort.

Ukraine: There are reports that some FPU leaders are under house arrest. We reached out to learn more, but there is almost nothing in English online.

Dutch LabourStart: We had a 30 minute call with one of our few remaining active correspondents in the Netherlands and discussed reviving our Dutch language page.

News: There was a small problem – when a story was tagged with two countries, and given a higher priority, that wasn’t taken into account on the second country’s page. This has now been fixed. We’ve also removed links to sign up to our mailing list (which could only be found on the state/province news pages.) Nearly everyone who joins our list does so by signing up to a campaign.

Interns: Cornell University has sent on details of 14 prospective interns.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew again this week by 100 — 89 of them for the English list.

Podcasts: We’re arranging an interview with a former union official in the US who has written a book about call centre workers.

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.