Inside LabourStart

One of my ongoing gripes is that unions that ask LabourStart for campaigns sometimes do very little to promote them to their own members.  An opportunity to bring members of a new union, or even a new country, into the network of people who regularly support our campaigns is therefore missed.

In the past, I’ve chided some of our Korean comrades for this and in the last week we’ve seen a complete turnaround.  The Korean teachers union and the railway workers union have mobilized members and supporters in their own ranks, in their own country, and these have been added to the thousands from outside Korea to support our current campaigns.

The result is that our Korean language mailing list has grown ten-fold almost overnight, from just over 150 (where it had languished for months) to 1,646 this morning.  It has gone from being our 21st largest language to being our 9th.

The real test will be what happens when we mail to this list about a non-Korean campaign – for example, our current campaign on Kazakhstan.  Will we see a strong response?  We’ll try to test this later today.

Campaigns: In the last 2 weeks we launched two new ones — in support of striking railway workers in Korea, and jailed oil workers in Kazakhstan.  Both are exceptionally important — these are dramatic struggles where workers are up against the power of the state, and I hope everyone will do their bit to make these campaigns among our biggest ever.  We’ll be launching a followup campaign next week for the Crown Holdings workers in Canada.  I hope after that we’ll be able to take a short break before the new year — to catch our collective breath …

Mailing lists: Due to an extraordinary effort by the Korean teachers’ union to build support in the country for their campaign, we picked up several hundred Koreans for our mailing list.  As a result, Korean has gone from being our 21st largest list to being the 11th largest, with 714 subscribers (this was just 173 a month ago).

Berlin 2014: Two weeks ago I reported that we had 128 people signed up for the conference; today that number is 197.  The largest groups are from Germany (44), the UK (24), Pakistan (15), Liberia (12) and Nigeria (11).  I’m still not certain that the comrades from Pakistan, Liberia and Nigeria and some other countries have fully understood that LabourStart is not covering airfares, although it’s possible that some of them will be in Berlin for the ITUC.  The registration form is now available in Russian as well as English and German; we expect that a Dutch version is on the way.  Tom and Edd developed a comprehensive strategy for promoting the conference to a UK audience, so we should see the size of the UK contingent grow.  Meanwhile, I’ve focussed some attention on building participation from Finland, Denmark, Israel, the Czech Republic and Poland, with more countries coming soon.

Books: We’re about to begin work on book 4 — a collection of essays by former IUF General Secretary Dan Gallin.  Sales of the earlier books and calendar remain sluggish.

Two years after the shocking massacre, seven oil workers remain in prison — and we’ve launched a new LabourStart campaign today to demand their release.  Please help spread the word:

At the request of the Korean railway workers union, the ITUC and the ITF, we just launched a major new online campaign in defense of the right to strike.  And we’ve been warned to expect a new campaign from Kazakhstan next week, probably timed to coincide with Human Rights Day (10 December).  At the moment we’re running 10 campaigns, 9 of them global, and the largest one has 14,431 supporters, though only one other has broken the 10,000 barrier.

Our mailing lists grew slightly smaller as despite running new campaigns, we were running them to the same audiences, not picking up new ones. (We’re down over 600 subscribers this month.) It’s vitally important that unions which partner with us when doing a campaign understand this — otherwise our list will continue to fall little by little every month.

And though our numbers on social networks are steadily rising, there was a falling off of traffic to our websites.

The previous month’s numbers are in brackets below.

Mailing lists

Total for all lists: 117,869 [118,504]

English: 83,669 [84,236]
French: 6,813 [6,828]
Spanish: 5,138 [5,140]
Italian: 4,002 [4,026]
German: 3,870 [3,886]
Turkish: 3,272 [3,274]
Norwegian: 2,911 [2,927]
Russian: 2,091 [2,089]
Dutch: 1,414 [1,426]
Chinese: 1,073 [1,078]
Finnish: 584 [570]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 321 [322]
Polish: 281 [282]
Portuguese: 263 [256]
Tagalog: 254 [254]
Hebrew: 246 [247]
Farsi: 241 [245]
Indonesian: 199 [182]
Swedish: 192 [195]
Korean 178 [177]
Danish: 134 [137]
Czech: 86 [88]
Esperanto: 75 [74]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 59 [60]
Hindi: 40 [40]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 18 [19]
Creole: 12 [13]
Vietnamese:12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers

English: 10,774 [10,478]
Canada English: 2,521 [2,430]
Canada French: 318 [304]
French: 194 [189]
USA: 78 [57]
Spanish: 63 [62]
Japanese: 23 [23]
Russian: 16 [16]
German: 15 [15]
Portuguese: 7 [7]

Facebook
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 8,167 [7,998]
Members of LabourStart group: 6,281 [6,106]
Like LabourStart page (French): 350 [343]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 129 [129]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 103 [99]

UnionBook
Members: 5,657 [5,635]

LinkedIn
LabourStart group: 1,465 [1,429]

Flickr
Union group on Flickr: 740 [738]

Website

Correspondents: 678 [673]

Website traffic

LabourStart.org (1&1 statistics)

Total visits: 629,107 [669,594]
Peak day: 26,535 [27,154]
Page impressions: 1,556,129 [1,707,274]

LabourStart.org (Clicky)

Total visitors: 51,338 [63,424]
Peak day: 5,127 [4,966]
Where they come from:
USA – 9,902 [11,091]
Indonesia – 8,133 [12,967]
Canada –  7,865 [10,208]
UK – 6,885 [8,086]
Australia – 2,785 [3,179]
Norway – 1,748 [1,897]
Germany – 944 [932]
Sweden – 913 [966]
France – 788 [807]
Netherlands – 679 [—]

LabourStartCampaigns.net (Clicky)

Total visitors: 28,299 [41,088]
Peak day: 5,181 [6,044]
Where they come from:
UK – 5,841 [5,809]
USA – 4,997 [5,821]
Canada – 4,076 [6,692]
Australia – 1,798 [1,882]
Spain – 1,101 [1,787]
France – 966 [1,216]
Belgium – 925 [1,649]
Norway – 778 [1,017]
Germany – 742 [1,669]
Netherlands 626 —

Campaigns: We launched another campaign today, in support of locked out workers in the USA.  Meanwhile, our Sri Lanka campaign is doing well, with well over 8,000 messages sent — a significant number of them from Australia.  Our volunteer translators have been working very hard on the many campaigns we’ve had in the last few weeks.  We expect to very soon have another campaign in support of Korean railway workers — now being reviewed by the ITF and ITUC.  And we’ve just learned today that the 3 Cosas campaign here in London has been victorious.  They had a LabourStart campaign that was UK-only during the summer.

Berlin 2014: The organizing committee in Berlin continues to meet regularly and a draft agenda is shaping up very nicely. Last week I reported that 40 people had registered so far; today that number is 128, with the largest groups coming from the UK (19) and Germany (19).  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today.

Publications: Sales of our calendar have started to pick up — in part due to publicity we did today.   (Free shipping helps.)  This afternoon so far we’ve sold 6 of them to 6 separate individuals.  So the total so far is 197 — but I have every hope that we’ll be over 200 tomorrow and sales will continue to rise as we approach Christmas.

Upcoming meetings: Tom is attending the Unions 21 conference in London tomorrow.  I’ll be speaking next Friday in Freiburg, Germany at an academic conference on “Mobility and Civil Society: How social commitment takes place.”  Among other things, it will be an opportunity to meet German students and talk up our conference.

Articles: I submitted a piece to the ITUC’s online magazine Equal Times about the trade union movement in Georgia; it should appear next week.

This blog: I fixed a problem we were having with the new subscription module.  If you’re getting this as an email, this means it all works.

FirstEnergy sounds like a very nasty employer, having locked out 150 unionized workers three days before Thanksgiving.

They’re the target of the latest LabourStart campaign, launched at the request of IndustriALL and PSI this afternoon.

Six months before our Global Solidarity Conference opens in Berlin, and just one day after the first mass mailing to our English list, we’re already up to 112 registrants from 39 countries. It’s just above 39% female, which is below our goal of 50%.

This is something that never happened with previous conferences, so this looks to be a very big one. 

Some of the registrants, unfortunately, are ignoring or have misunderstood our message — which I tried to make clear — that LabourStart is not paying anyone’s airfare.  Still, the vast majority of those who registered are clearly planning on attending.

The largest groups come from Germany (21) and the UK (17).

We haven’t even done our mass mailing to our German list yet — and we have 3,855 people on the German list — quite of few of whom, we hope, will attend.

Campaigns: Three new campaigns were launched in the last week, plus we did publicity for the IUF campaign on Colombia and IndustriALL’s campaign on Iraq.  I really appreciate the incredible work done by our volunteer translators in getting these translations done.

Berlin 2014: Our conference blog is being updated, some 40 people have already registered, and we’re doing loads of publicity. On Friday, I was invited to address a meeting of global union communicators at the ITF headquarters in London about the conference.  There were participants from the ITUC, ITF, IndustriALL, PSI, etc.  I migrated the entire database of conference participants to a relational database using MySQL, which has made it much easier to display (and sort) the list of people who’ve registered.  I wrote to 10 comrades in Turkey specifically appealing for help building a Turkish contingent; no one has replied yet.  If you’ve not yet registered, please do so today – click here.

Mailings to national lists: We just did a mailing to our UK list advertising a half dozen events taking place in the next month and plan to do this regularly; we encouraged people to submit their events to our online events list — and we’ll take future ones from there.  We also did a Canada-only mailing today promoting a Bangladesh garment workers’ meeting in Toronto.

Writings: I had an article in Solidarity about the successful railway workers’ strike in Georgia and have been commissioned to write something on the same subject for Equal Times.  I have also been commissioned to write about the Histadrut’s recent organizing successes for Jungle World, in Germany.

Book & calendar sales: Still sluggish.  We’ve now sold 190 calendars; our third book (Firefox OS) is up to over 160.  An attempt to promote sales of the book on the Iraqi labour movement, “Hadi Never Died”, disappointed with only two sales. Tom is preparing a calendar of trade union events in the UK at which we can sell our publications in 2014, following on the success Derek had at the CUPE convention in Canada.  Comrades — you can help by posting reviews of our books on Amazon and spreading the word about all LabourStart publications.

Social networks: Our group on Facebook is growing quite quickly, though we’re doing nothing to promote it.  66 people joined in the last week alone.  On Twitter, we’ve launched a low-key, low-cost ad campaign which has brought us 12 new followers in the last 2 days (at a cost of £2.00).

At the request of IndustriALL Global Union we’ve launched our third campaign in a week — this one in support of workers in Sri Lanka.

IndustriALL has even done a nice logo for the campaign with their logo and a version of ours.

And after you’ve sent it off, see what you get on the landing page.