Inside LabourStart

Berlin conference:  The list of participants continues to grow — two weeks ago we had 352 registrants from 58 countries; today that’s 420 from 68 countries.  The number coming from Germany is now 84, up from 77.  The team in Berlin is doing a fantastic job, meeting regularly and building up a solid programme of workshops and plenaries.  We’ve now begun weekly Skype conference calls involving myself, Derek and Gisela and this will continue in the run-up to the event.  We are doing a monthly mailing to all those who registered and in last week’s mailing we made a special appeal for people to volunteer as interpreters.  Our volunteer translators have begun translating the conference website into Spanish (as well as English and German), and the registration form now works in 8 languages.  And we now have a donations page in German (in the hope that our raised profile in the German labour movement may help generate donations).  The ITUC has agreed to promote our conference in their next mailing to delegates to their upcoming world congress in Berlin.

Campaigns:  We launched four new campaigns in the last two weeks after a period of relative calm.  Here they are (with the current number of supporters in brackets): Korea [7,178], Bangladesh [4,007], Peru [838], and Canada [508].  The last of these is a Canada-only campaign; all the others are global.  We closed down the Sri Lanka campaign today and the USA (First Energy) campaign last week.  We’re hoping to launch a Ukraine campaign in the next few days.  Finally, our French language ActNOW RSS feed is greatly improved, with French text replacing the English that remained there.

New languages: We’ve had an offer to translate LabourStart into Hindi which is great, and something we’ve wanted for a very long time.  Now that we have a Hungarian language edition, we need correspondents, so I wrote to all the Hungarians I could find on our English language mailing list — and the first of them has now volunteered to be a correspondent.

Books:  Andy completed the translation into French of our second book (global labour movements) which is now on sale at Amazon, CreateSpace, etc.  He did a mailing to our French language list which generated a lot of interest (nearly 50 sales in the first few days), and it appears that we’ll need to have copies of all our books, in English and French, in Berlin for sale to delegates.  We’re also working hard on Dan Gallin’s book in order to get it ready well in advance of the Berlin conference — at which we’ll have book launch with Dan speaking.

My new contact details: Please note that I am contactable in many ways, but no longer at the old phone number.  I’ve written up what I’m doing and why and encourage LabourStart correspondents to use email where possible, and in urgent cases only, to use Telegram or Skype to reach me.

Companies have not been good about paying compensation to victims of last year’s catastrophe in Bangladesh, so we’ve been asked by IndustriALL, UNI and the Clean Clothes Campaign to launch a big online campaign — now live here.  Please sign it, translate it, spread the word in your union.

PSI has asked us to host this one, which we’ll promote today and tomorrow together with other new campaigns focussing on Bangladesh and Ukraine.

Details soon.

After 3 months, the UWUA and IndustriALL have agreed to close this campaign.

Unfortunately, the lockout continues.

We have three more campaigns in the pipeline, though I hope we won’t launch all three today …

February was not a good month for our statistics — across the board, we saw notable falls in traffic to our website.

The reason is simple: we launched just one campaign in February, and had fewer mailings than usual.  So while we still have tens of thousands of people who visit our website every day, the main source of traffic is always the campaigns.  New and popular campaigns are the only way to rapidly grow traffic to our site.

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below. Notable growth is indicated in bold, green.

Mailing lists [with 200 or more subscribers]

English: 85,207 [85,250]
French: 7,603 [7,215]
Spanish: 5,136 [5,156]
Italian: 4,143 [4,146]
German: 4,062 [4,070]
Turkish: 3,253 [3,253]
Norwegian: 2,836 [2,902]
Russian: 2,518 [2,874]
Korean: 1,834 [1,861]
Dutch: 1,400 [1,401]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,074]
Finnish: 622 [630]
Japanese: 390 [391]
Arabic: 319 [321]
Portuguese: 269 [269]
Polish: 269 [280]
Indonesian: 254 [263]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 246 [247]
Farsi: 242 [242]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 11,571 [11,409]
Canada English: 2,853 [2,751]
Canada French: 395 [378]
French: 201 [200]
USA: 187 [168]
Spanish: 67 [67]
German: 42 [38]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [16]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook

Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,475 [8,381]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,843 [6,715]
Like LabourStart page (French): 389 [380]
Like LabourStart page (German): 279 [235]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 131 [131]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 105 [104]

UnionBook
Members: 5,737 [5,707]

LinkedIn
LabourStart group: 1,562 [1,521]

Flickr
Union group on Flickr: 744 [743]

Website

Correspondents: 698 [691]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 552,898 [671,485]
Peak day: 23,305 [29,980]
Page impressions: 1,425,275 [1,568,434]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 32,524 [58,483]
Peak day: 3,212 [6,041]
Where they come from:
USA – 7,311 [13,091]
Canada – 5,317 [10,499]
UK – 3,408 [9,123]
Australia – 2,083 [4,081]
Norway – 1,791 [2,226]
Germany – 1,126 [1,690]
Indonesia – 849 [949]
India – 828 [–]
France – 721 [1,101]
Sweden – 683 [1,163]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 15,361 [58,832]
Peak day: 3,636 [6,959]
Where they come from:
USA – 2,144 [9,441]
Canada – 1,933 [9,116]
UK – 1,755 [8,750]
Russia – 1,304 [4,739]
Belgium – 1,133 [1,730]
Australia – 882 [3,165]
South Korea – 709 [–]
France – 644 [2,004]
Germany – 554 [2,535]
Spain – 446 [1,933]

Thanks so much to Andy for doing this!

Le Mouvement Ouvrier International : Une Introduction – Un guide concis des organisations syndicales mondiales is now available for purchase from CreateSpace, Amazon, etc.

It’s not the first time we’ve been asked to do a campaign in support of our brothers and sisters in South Korea— but it’s the first time it’s tied into a “people’s strike” which is taking place there next Tuesday.

We’ll be getting a mass mailing out and texts for translation in the next few hours.

Let’s make this campaign massive!

Berlin conference:  We’ve made lots of progress on a wide range of issues, most of the work having been done by the organizing committee in Berlin.

We’re now up to 352 registered participants from 58 countries with the largest groups coming from Germany (77), the UK (49) and Nigeria (31).

Because of the very large number of people who’ve signed up to come from Africa, we’ve actually done a mailing to all of them and have recruited some new correspondents.  We’ve also been warned that some of these will not be representatives of genuine independent and democratic trade unions and are showing caution in who gets invitation letters (to get a visa into Germany).

Because of number of registrants we did consider moving the conference to a larger venue, but the majority of members of the organizing committee decided to stick with our current venue.

We’re still putting together the agenda, organizing solidarity housing for the 147 registrants who requested it, working on the visas, dealing with interpretation into the various languages, and much more.

Only 3 months to go!

Campaigns:

• It seems like we’re about to launch a new campaign in support of workers in Korea — details coming soon.
• We were going to close down the Sri Lanka campaign today, after three months, but IndustriALL has requested an extension.
• We received a lovely email from the union at the Labatt brewery where our campaign helped them win their very long strike — and we emailed our entire list about this win.
• We also received a message updating the Huber Ballesteros campaign (see below).
• We closed two campaigns — Mexico and a UK-only campaign but haven’t gotten updates back from either union.  It’s very important that unions which request campaigns from us report back to us on a regular basis and particularly when a campaign ends.

New language: We now have LabourStart in Hungarian — with some news already added by our only senior correspondent who speaks the language …

News interface: Now available in Italian for our Italian-speaking correspondents.

MailChimp: We’ve had our first mailings done by users other than me (which I need to approve) and these have been successful.  It’s great to share the load here.

Donations: I’ve now fixed the donations page so that if you’re donating in US dollars, the USA becomes your default country; if in Australian dollars, Australia is your default country, and so on.  This had been causing problems for some Americans trying to donate by credit card via PayPal.

We’ve just received the attached message from Justice for Colombia.  Our campaign in support of jailed trade union leader Huber Ballesteros has resulted in some improvements:

He was finally moved to a different wing of the prison, where the conditions are better than where he was previously being held, with less overcrowding and a cleaner environment. He now has his own cell, whereas before he was sharing with 3 other men, one of whom was a paramilitary which was very dangerous for him. The wing where he is now also has different rules for visitors, so family and friends are able to bring him food on Sundays. This is very important as Huber suffers from diabetes and has been denied the special diet he needs from the prison authorities, so it is essential that he can be provided with food for a good balanced meal at least once a week.  The authorities are considering his request to be able to write a book whilst he is in prison. [For the full text, click here – huber ]

Campaigns: I’ve fixed two things that were nagging me — (1) When signing up to support a campaign, you now must choose a country, and “Select a counrtry” doesn’t count.  Previously, we had “Afghanistan” as our first country and had large numbers of people ignoring this and letting that remain.  They’re now being forced to choose.  (2) You now have to enter a valid email address, with a “@” and full stops (periods).  Obviously we’re not completely testing, and some invalid email addresses will slip through., but at least you have to enter something that remotely looks like an email address.

News: See below — this should help expand the reach of our news stories.  (I’ve written to all our correspondents about this today.)

Mailing list: I’ve invited a number of senior correspondents and translators who already do mass mailngs to use MailChimp directly — and very pleased to see that several have taken me up on the offer.  This should speed things up a bit when sending out mailings.  We’ve nearly completed the migration of our language mailing lists from Sendy to MailChimp.

Berlin conference: Lots happening — details to come.

Interface for adding news: Our Finnish and (soon) Italian correspondents will have an interface in their languages when they post news.  This is already the case with a number of the languages.

Books: We’re making progress on the Dan Gallin book, which is already several hundred pages long.  Andy has translated the global labour book into French.  Tom is doing an inventory of books in the office and calculating how many we’ve sold in the first year as a publisher.

Dates of news stories: The dates appearing next to news stories now appear in the more standard dd-mm-yyyy format — an improvement suggested by Andy.

Campaigns:  There are a couple of suggested new ones.  Meanwhile, we closed the Fiji campaign — a big win.

Articles: I had two more articles appear on the KESK trial in Turkey — in Labor Notes and OpenDemocracy.net.