Inside LabourStart

Here are some preliminary numbers from the conference that Gisela has correlated for us:

• 360 people signed the participants lists, of which 46% women. Not too bad a quota although 4% short of ideal :).  (slightly cheating because voluntary interpreters signed up as well and they were overwhelmingly female. But a) they were interested as well b) it doesn’t make a huge difference). Great job!
• We had 163 contributions in the programme (speakers/facilitators). Some people who spoke in several sessions are counted several times here. Of these 163, 71 or 44% were women. Again not bad, but a bit short of our goal :).  
• People came from 48 countries. 

We’re currently working on a lot more conference followup including:

1. Getting reports from all the workshops and getting these up on the web
2. Getting feedback forms from a far greater number of participants — only 29 so far, so we’ll need to send out reminders.  I think a reasonable target is 20%, or 72 feedback forms back.
3. Getting as many of those 163 contributions up on the web — and getting the best of them ready for publication in our next book — Global Crisis, Global Solidarity (publication date: September 2014)
4. Continuing to thank everyone, to pay outstanding bills, and to followup with all the great ideas we got at the conference and aftewards

Sounds like a horror film, but it’s actually the latest LabourStart campaign:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=2316

Please spread the word.

Mailing lists [with 200 or more subscribers]

English: 85,334 [85,670]
French: 7,827 [7,801]
Spanish: 5,150 [5,131]
German: 5,147 [5,069]
Italian: 4,099 [4,115]
Turkish: 3,442 [3,440]
Norwegian: 2,876 [2,878]
Russian: 2,525 [2,524]
Korean: 2,122 [2,122]
Dutch: 1,355 [1,349]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,073]
Finnish: 655 [609]
Japanese: 494 [494]
Arabic: 469 [390]
Portuguese: 356 [351]
Indonesian: 316 [265]
Polish: 269 [269]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 246 [243]
Farsi: 242 [242]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 12,272 [11,995]
Canada English: 3,191 [3,067]
Canada French: 445 [432]
USA: 304 [252]
French: 209 [209]
Spanish: 69 [66]
German: 58 [48]
Indonesia: 32 [26]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 17 [17]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,710 [8,633]
Members of LabourStart group: 7,691 [7,511]
Like LabourStart page (French): 421 [418]
Like LabourStart page (German): 344 [315]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 135 [134]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 108 [105]

UnionBook

Members: 5,780 [5,760]

LinkedIn

LabourStart group: 1,646 [1,625]

Flickr

Union group on Flickr: 778 [774]

Website

Correspondents: 714 [703]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 43,005 [40,845]

Where they come from:

USA – 9,670 [9,419]
Canada – 6,694 [7,245]
UK – 5,711 [5,478]
Germany – 3,126 [1,671]
Australia – 2,630 [2,670]
Norway – 1,665 [1,562]
France – 911 [871]
Indonesia – 853 [760]
Netherlands — 813 [–]
Belgium — 738 [718]

Their operating systems:

Windows – 68.3% [68.9%]
Mobile – 14.6% [13.8%] (iOS – 7.8% [7.2%]; Android – 4.8% [4.7%])
Mac – 15.1% [15.4%]
Linux – 2.1% [1.9%]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 32,148 [33,523]

Where they come from:

UK – 4,995 [4,679]
USA – 4,943 [4,343]
Canada – 3,698 [4,980]
Germany – 2,408 [3,292]
Australia – 1,644 [1,450]
Indonesia — 1,643 [–]
Spain – 1,282 [1,153]
Belgium – 1,036 [1,186]
France – 983 [1,224]
Italy – 897 [884]

Their operating systems:

Windows – 66.5% [68.5%]
Mobile – 20.9% [18.8%] (iOS – 8.9% [9.8%] ; Android – 9.5% [7.7%])
Mac – 10.4% [10.6%]
Linux – 2.1% [2.1%]

The Dan Gallin book is available on Amazon’s Canada site, but with a wait time of 3-5 weeks.  I’ve written to CreateSpace to raise this issue with them.  Meanwhile, I did a mailing to 12,000 Canadians today to tell them that they could order the book there — and also via Amazon Canada, on Kindle as well.

Our next book, Global Crisis, Global Solidarity, is beginning to take shape.  We will be asking all those who made presentations at our conference in Berlin to submit their texts, then we’ll make a selection, edit them and publish.  My target is to get a book ready by the end of August.

I’ve done an inventory of book sales since we began about 18 months ago.  We’ve sold 2,799 books so far.  Here are the totals for all, including Kindle sales:

• Campaigning Online and Winning – 1,136
• The Global Labour Movement – 823
• Firefox OS for Activists – 390
• Solidarity – Dan Gallin – 276
• Campaigning – French – 97
• Global labour – French – 77

Conference:

The most important thing that happened this month was, of course, the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference that took place last weekend in Berlin.  We’re preparing a report on that right now, so nothing further to say here.

Books:

We published our 6th book — Solidarity, the Selected Essays of Dan Gallin. Sales are approaching 300 copies after little more than two weeks. A Kindle edition will go live later this week.

Work has already begun on our next book — Global Crisis, Global Solidarity — a collection of articles and speeches from our conference.

Campaigns:

We launched four campaigns in the last month:

• Germany: Solidarity with strikers at Autogrill – now closed
• Philippines: Stop union-busting at NXP Semiconductors – still active
• Indonesia: Support strikers at one of the world’s largest paper mills – still active
• Turkey: For the right to celebrate May Day in Taksim Square – now closed

There is now a live running total showing for active campaigns — there is no need to do anything to show this.

The mycampaigns.cgi script — which is what we link to at the bottom of our mass mailings in English — was broken, but has now been fixed. It’s an important way to encourage people to support our other campaigns.

Finally, the display of news stories on campaign pages has also now been fixed.

Office:

As we anticipate the closure of the Lee Valley Technopark, we are currently looking for new, inexpensive offices in London.

Labour News Network:

This has now been revived. See here for details.

Publicity:

We have a new and growing list of 239 media contacts and have been doing regular mailings to them. We mailed 6 times to them in the last month. Every campaign launch now includes a press release from us.

Before the Berlin conference we printed out full-colour flyers advertising LabourStart in English, German and Russian. These were distributed at May Day events in London and Berlin, and many copies were taken away from our Berlin conference.  We also printed and distributed widely postcards advertising Dan Gallin’s new book.

We had stalls displaying our books and other publications at the 3rd World Congress of the International Trade Union Confederation in Berlin earlier this month, at the DGB (German national trade union centre) congress, and at May Day in Berlin.

I was asked recently to do a 500 word piece for the British website Union News about our Berlin conference.

Here is the result — it shows you my thinking about what our Global Solidarity Conference is all about:

http://union-news.co.uk/2014/05/confronting-difficult-challenges-facing-international-labour-movement/

I had an email message yesterday from our comrades in Turkey reporting on the deaths of hundreds of miners in Soma, which they posted to their union website in English.  I immediately made it a top global labour news story on LabourStart — and then learned from them that their website had been hacked and their statement was no longer available.

With a general strike looming in Turkey, I asked them to send me the text of their statement — and then I built (from scratch) a new version of our Labour News Network which you can see here:

http://labournewsnetwork.wordpress.com/

This allowed our readers around the world to see the Turkish unions’ statement, even though their own website was down.

The Labour News Network is something we tried some years back as a way to offer unions a way to post content to LabourStart even if they have no website.  It could be particularly useful for reports from the field — e.g., in future worker-correspondents could post reports, including photos and videos, directly from the field.

This is something we can discuss in Berlin and afterwards …

Update: Our campaigns are back online.

Our domain name for campaigns (labourstartcampaigns.net) seems to have expired, causing an error message when anyone or anything tries to access our campaigns.  I’ve reported this to the company which hosts the site and which is responsible for the domain.  Fingers crossed, this will be sorted shortly.  Meanwhile, I’m having to answer all the emails coming in reporting this …  Very bad timing!

I am very pleased to announce that today, LabourStart has published our fourth book — Solidarity: Selected Essays by Dan Gallin.  

These essays span a period of nearly six decades and cover a very wide range of subjects.

The book is 262 pages long and is selling from CreateSpace for just $11.99.

It will soon be available from Amazon and other websites around the world.

A Kindle edition will also become available in the next few days.

We have shipped hundreds of copies to Berlin where we will sell them at both the ITUC World Congress and LabourStart’s own Global Solidarity Conference which opens in less than two weeks.

Gallin himself will attend that event and we’ll hold a book launch there.

More details soon.

This campaign, which came to us from IndustriALL and the local union the Philippines, is going live today.

Please do what you can to spread the word.