Inside LabourStart

Well, it’s been two weeks, actually. And there’s a lot to report, so here goes:

Recruiting new correspondents: This is a priority for us and we’re going to tackle it one country at a time. This week we wrote to our 459 email subscribers in South Africa asking them to check out our news page and to apply to be correspondents.

Turkey campaign: This has been growing, now with 4,510 supporters. The campaign appears in 21 languages, which is a lot for us. Among these is Urdu, for the very first time, I think. We also picked up over 100 new subscribers to our mailing list from Turkey in a recent update.

Thailand campaign: Yesterday this was our smallest current campaign, with just 3,842 supporters. But a follow-up mailing to the English list meant we picked up over 700 new supporters and are now up to 4,563 — surpassing the Turkey campaign. This campaign now appears in 14 languages, with more on the way.

Social media: Our home page now features links to all five of our active social media accounts, including the newest – Bluesky, and we’ve dropped links our inactive Instagram and Mastodon accounts.

Donations: We are waiting on one pledged donation and we are hoping for one more that we applied for. In early January, we will have to chase after major union donors and individuals if we are to stay secure for the next few months.

Germany: The teachers’ union GEW asked us to design a postcard (colour, two-sided) which we did and got the short text translated into German. They will be printing this out and distributing it to everyone attending the union’s conference next month. GEW already made a generous donation to us in 2023.

This month we return to reporting mailing list numbers.  Over the next few months we will likely see large changes in the numbers as the problems that resulted from several service provider changes are corrected.

Also this month we start reporting on the Bluesky account which was created mid-month.  Currently we have just one Blusky account, a Global news feed in English, but if the site continues to grow others will be added.

As of this month we will be reporting stories posted.

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:

3166 (105.5 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: 84800-84014

French: 7642

German: 5503-5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4367-4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 2819-3117

Russian: 2672-2702

Norwegian: 1996-2232

Romanian:  1730-1771

Dutch: 1437-1536

The others:

Arabic:  763-821

Belarusian:  288-293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 964-902

Creole:  11

Czech: 58-61

Danish: 79-93

Esperanto: 187-190

Farsi:  164-207

Finnish:  438-476

Georgian:  176-156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  270-295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  169-186

Indonesian:  385-460

Japanese: 382-398

Lithuanian:  62-63

Malaysian: 20-21

Polish: 964-970

Portuguese: 1274-1292

Punjabi:  2

Serbian:  97

Sinhalese: 1

Slovak: 15

Swedish: 909-950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  142-152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  608-677

LabourStart Translators:  104-97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 69-51

Donors:  885

 

FLICKR:

Members:  840

Photos:  10366-10225

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  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: 9188-9161

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

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 495

LabourStart Brasil:  550-547

LabourStart Turkce:  2k, details unavailable

LabourStart TV likes: 462-443

LabourStart TV follows:  455-465

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 188-176

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: 2636-2623

Page: 318-305

 

PODCASTS:

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.

PODCASTS:

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. 412 downloads: Interview with Carlos Ching-Hung Wang, the president of the China Steel Express Union (Taiwan).
2. 315 downloads: Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU)
3. 296 downloads: Interview with Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of IndustriAll Europe.

 

BLUESKY:

As an experiment we created a global news in English feed earlier this month.  The account is growing far more quickly than any other of our social media accounts ever did.

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.

Global English-language: 5.9k, details unavailable.

 

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.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Bluesky or Mastodon).

Global English: 37321-38245

Canada English: 21637-22574

Global Portuguese: 10131-10381

Global Spanish: 10835-10503

Australia: 9695-10133

USA: 4805-5035

Canada French: 3199-3313

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.

 

 

New logo: We needed a generic logo to use on our social media accounts and had our graphic designer modify an existing one we used. We think the new logo actually looks pretty good.

Bluesky: Last week we reported that in our first week using the new platform we picked up over 3,000 supporters. Today, that’s nearly doubled to over 5,800 followers. We’ve shared 265 posts so far and many of them are being liked and passed on. That’s a lot more than most other Bluesky accounts belonging to global unions. Of the ones we could find, they ranged from 188 to 1,000 followers — but these numbers will certainly grow. To help them grow their followings, this week we also created our first “starter pack” on Bluesky, listing all the global and European union federations with a presence on the new platform. We publicised this widely and will be creating more such “packs”. If you want to help, get in touch.

Mailing lists: As part of an effort to allow segmentation of our lists to work, which requires that we ‘tag’ each email subscriber with their country names, we’ve been adding thousands of new subscribers and tagging many existing ones. As a result, for example, we now have a mailing list for the USA with over 13,500 subscribers. We’re doing this country by country, starting with the English-speaking ones. This will allow for much more targetted mailings.

Donations: Unions and individuals continue to respond generously to our appeal. This week NITO, the Norwegian union for engineers and technicians, told us that they honoured Thomas Seltzer and gave him a NOK 50,000 prize — which he donated in full to LabourStart.

KESK campaign: We did a lot to grow this campaign this week. It grew to 3,870 supporters and appears in 14 languages, with more coming.

Thailand campaign: This new campaign also saw growth last week and now has 3,295 followers. It appears in 11 languages with more on the way.

Bluesky: Our brand-new account there [@labourstart.bsky.social] has picked up over 3,100 followers since our launch last week. We have posted 106 times to that list this week and are closely monitoring responses to the posts, also comparing this to our account on Twitter.

Mastodon: We have decided to stop posting to Mastodon and we will limit our social media presence to Facebook, X, Bluesky and LinkedIn only (for now).

Campaigns: We were given two new campaigns on the same day and are launching them over the course of the next several days. One involves the arrest of a trade union activist in Turkey and the other focusses on union-busting in Thailand. Translations are starting to go live today. Please do what you can to share these.

News: In the first three weeks of this month, 34 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,218 stories — more than 100 per day.

 

Campaigns: We’ve given our Georgia campaign a boost in a mass mailing; it is our smallest current campaign with just over 4,100 supporters. We’ve also helped to raise money for the strikers there via the UNI website, and we made a donation on behalf of LabourStart. We’ve been approached about possible campaigns this week in Turkey and Uganda. We also asked about a possible campaign on Iran.

Podcasts: We interviewed one of the Evolution Gaming strikers this week — our first podcast in several weeks.

Mailing lists: In the course of moving back and forth between systems, we lost the country names for a lot of subscribers. But now we’ve written software that reads through our campaign supporters database and updates our mailing list — and tested this on our Canadian supporters. It turns out the 20% of our mailing list are Canadians. This allows us to do targetted mailings based on country.  Our list has grown significantly as well with almost 6,000 new subscribers, all from Canada, being added. We will do this for other countries as well.

Mailings: We did three mailings to our English list this week, which is a lot for us. These included promotions for the winners of the LabourStart CLIFF video award, the Arthur Svensson international prize for trade union rights, and our latest podcast (see above).

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,432 news stories in the first 14 days of November, averaging over 100 per day. Unfortunately, only 32 correspondents were active during this period and we need to find way to reactivate the many inactive ones — and recruit new ones.

 

 

US elections: We’ve been posting every union statement we could find, mostly (but not only) from unions in the US.

Finances: We continue to receive generous donations from individual trade unionists as well as from their unions. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last few weeks, but we’re not there yet.

We were delighted to hear from one union in Norway which decided to give us 1 NOK for every member of the member. Another union, in Germany, with two million members, just sent out their magazine to all of them including our appeal for funds and a link.

Arthur Svensson prize: Once again we’ve done a mass mailing to our list to promote the Arthur Svensson prize for international trade union rights. We hope that it will bring in many good nominees this year.

Country pages in French: It was pointed out to us that the Canada page in French still had a lot of residual English. We have now begun the process of fixing this. We will probably need to do this for other languages as well.

CLIFF: The LabourStart Executive watched candidate films and selected two as winners. Next week we’ll be informing our lists how they can view those films online.

Finances: Our appeals to our supporters have led to some very generous donations, both by individuals and unions. Our financial situation is still by no means secure, but it is considerably better than where it was in early September. We fixed the ‘Donate’ link on our home pages in all languages to offer more donation options in more currencies.  Among those unions which have made donations in the last couple of weeks were the European Transport Workers Federation (ETF), European Public Service Union (EPSU), Canadian Staff Union, and The Society (Canada).

Campaigns: We will shortly be closing our three oldest campaigns — from Eswatini, Serbia and Czechia. That will leave us with four active campaigns. Two weeks ago, I closed the China campaign (in support of jailed journalists).

CLIFF: LabourStart will shortly be announcing the recipient of an award we give out each year to a film shown as part of the Canadian Labour International Film Festival.

Podcasts: We interviewed an activist from the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, New York.

Apologies for the late update of this blog; I was travelling in Georgia for most of this period.

During my time there I was able to meet three times with strikers at Evolution Gaming (see photo) where some 5,000 young workers have been on strike since mid-July. During one of those meetings, at a rally in front of the Evolution headquarters, I was asked to say a few words — part of the which the union shared online. We increased the number of sign-ups in the Georgian language and discussed next steps, including fund-raising to support the strikers.

While in Georgia, I also learned that an interview with me that took place a year ago appeared on the front page of the newspaper of the Ukrainian atomic workers union.

Marc Belanger has announced that Radio Labour’s International programme is shutting down after many years of great service to the international trade union movement. Our LabourStart podcasts can help take up the slack. As we reported a few weeks ago, our interview with trade unionists from Taiwan has become our most popular podcast so far, with just under 400 downloads. None of the other podcasts we’ve done have come even close to this.

I noticed that our Jobs page did not indicate how one submitted jobs to LabourStart. Now, on top of the page, it reads: “Want to post a job here? If you are a LabourStart volunteer correspondent, you can do this yourself. If you’re not a correspondent, email us at ericlee@labourstart.org.”

30 September was International Translation Day and I took the opportunity to write to all our translators, thanking them and telling them how important their work is.

And finally, a couple of the larger donations we were expecting came through — from the German education union GEW and from CUPE, the public sector union in Canada. We will need to do much more to restore LabourStart’s finances in the next few weeks and months.

After just 24 hours, and with 297 downloads, it looks like this one will soon be our most popular.

Our previous record was 311.

And we’re getting ‘fan mail’ sent via BuzzSprout and email:

Nice to hear your voice, Eric, and well worth a listen. – Paul Booth

I appreciate the Labour Start Podcast on the striking workers at the port(s) in Taiwan. All of these struggles affect workers everywhere. I will share this. – New Westminster, BC

I liked it, and I appreciate everything that Eric does and how long he’s done it. For me, the short interview is fine, but it could have been longer. I’m in my car, and have more time to listen. The interview was a little unclear because I did not understand initially who the union represents. I understand now that they are crews who crew ocean-going ships, as opposed to dock workers or other workers in the maritime industry. – Dover, New Hampshire

Had a chance to listen to interview with union president, Carlos Ching-Hung Wang. It was short enough I could fit it in to my available time. Second language aided authentic feeling about it. Thanks. –  Ken Collier, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

Sounds like ‘fire and hire’ has hit Taiwan’s seafarers! It’s a low-down tactic wherever it is used! – United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

Can you share addresses for the entities that Brother Carlos Ching-Hung Wong mentioned so that we can write to them? – Naperville, Illinois

 

 

 

Due to my absence on honeymoon, this report is delayed by about a week. It’s been a busy time for LabourStart.

Podcasts: We are resuming our podcasts, interviewing comrades in Belgium and Taiwan, linked to new campaigns we have launched (more below).

New campaigns: We launched a campaign in support of transport workers in Poland submitted by the European Transport Workers Federation. As Eric was absent during this period, Derek and Espen took up the slack and launched the campaign. Earlier in the month we launched a campaign in support of maritime workers in Taiwan, who are on strike. This campaign is our first in a very long time to appear in both Traditional and Simplified Chinese.  We are currently running eight (8) campaigns, which is nearly a record for us and which follows a long dry spell.  The largest of these is from India, with 4,714 supporters after less than four weeks online.

Languages: We now have a framework for campaigns in Tamil, and our first campaign running in that language.

Donations: The German education workers union GEW made a substantial donation as did the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and IndustriAll Europe.  But our financial situation remains quite difficult for now.

Mailing lists: Our lists grew this month, with the English list picking up 326 new subscribers and the Chinese list getting 119, with smaller numbers for the other lists. We also did our first mailing on Mailjet using segmentation, targetting people who have not clicked on a link in our messages.

Labour News Network: We ook another step toward revitalising this little-used part of our website — we published Espen’s report on South Sudan here.

Interns: Four of our former interns showed an interest in continuing to work with each other and with us. Next month we’ll try to organise an online meetup of all the interns we’ve had over the last 12 years.