Inside LabourStart

Calendar: Sale of our LabourStart Calendar for 2014 have stalled — we only sold 18 in the last 6 days (of those, 8 were in Canada, 5 in Australia, 3 in the UK and 2 in the USA).  I’ve already done two rounds of publicity and today will be mailing to nearly 500 state federations of labor and central labor councils in the USA in an attempt to boost sales there.

Campaigns:

• August was an exceptionally slow month for us, so 5 days ago I wrote to all our campaign partners — GUFs and others — asking if anyone needed help.  We got answers from a number of them an expect to launch several new campaigns in the next couple of weeks.
• Edd and I met with a leader of the UN staff union and they have been facing a brutal attack on workers’ rights from the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, and will probably be needing a campaign from us in the next few days.
• We closed down the Philippines campaign one month early (see below) and the GE Erie campaign one month late (at the request of the union).
• We did a special mailing to our Canadian subscribers boosting a number of campaigns there (not all of these were hosted by LabourStart).

Intern: As I reported below, Edd is leaving us at the end of this month (though will continue working one day a week for LabourStart) and we’ve begun the process of recruiting a replacement.

News:

• The biggest improvement, described below, is that now you can get beyond the first 50 news stories on any of our country pages.   (This will soon work on our home pages in the different languages as well.)
• I’ve also fixed a problem with links to the country names that were appearing on the home page in English — the first time the name appeared, the link would take you to our new, correct country news page, but the second appearance of the country name still took you to an old page.
• With so much coverage of the British TUC conference last week, we did a special mailing to our UK list promoting the news page.  It’s very important that we continue to draw attention to our news service, as many of the people on our mailing list are familiar with our campaigns — but not with the news we provide.

Correspondents: 

• As reported below, a correspondent can now change their default language and country — either temporarily or permanently.  This caused a small problem for senior correspondents, as Derek discovered, but this has now been fixed.
• We’ve been struggling to make sure that we have current email addresses for all the correspondents and Edd has nearly completed this task.
• This week, I resumed weekly mailings to correspondents and I intend to keep doing this.

Internationalization:

• Our failure to sustain LabourStart news in any Nordic language except Norwegian has been with us for some time.  This week, I wrote to all our subscribers on the English list from Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden and have received responses from 10 of them — at least one has volunteered to be a correspondent, others have already contact their national trade union centres in the hope of growing interest in LabourStart.
• Our French home page was the last one to be converted to our new format and this is now complete.

Kiev 2013: There will be a meeting of LabourStart correspondents from Russia, Ukraine and Georgia (and other countries?) in Kiev at the beginning of November.  Masha has drafted an invitation letter which I’ve read and approved, and Edd has found email addresses for all our correspondents from the region who have been invited.  I will be attending myself.

Berlin 2014: I’ve fixed a meeting at the ITUC in Brussels for two weeks from today to discuss how our conference ties in with theirs.  They’ve been exceptionally cooperative and this is hugely important for the success of our global solidarity conference.

Small screen version of LabourStart: Edd’s been working on a version of the site that will automatically appear when you view it on a smartphone, as we’ve done with campaigns.  This is nearly ready.

Daily tech tips for trade unionists: I  wrote ten of these which appeared over the last couple of weeks and got some nice and interesting feedback.  Would be interested to know if comrades would like this to continue.  Meanwhile, I’m pausing the effort.

If you visit any of our country pages (e.g., the USA), you’ll now see at the very bottom, after the last story, a link for more news.
If you click on it, it will show you the next 50 stories, and then after that, another 50 stories, and so on.
At the moment this is only working on the country pages, but tomorrow I’ll aim to get it working on the home page in all languages as well.
We’ll also be adding Search once again to the site, but this new function — which took quite some time to get right — is a huge improvement over where we stood until very recently.

Our intern, Edd Mustill, is finishing up nearly a full year at LabourStart and is moving on (though will continue working for us one day a week).  So we’re hiring again – full details here.

We’ve gotten permission from our comrades in the Alliance of Progressive Labor in the Philippines to close down this campaign.  The campaign has been running for two months, appeared in 18 languages (including Tagalog), and got 11,717 messages sent.  According to the APL, “Please let everyone know that their letters have helped us in pressuring the Office of the President to direct the NBI, our pale version of the FBI, and the LTFRB to look into the matter immediately. We are far from receiving justice in these cases, and we might not even get it, but please let them know we will not stop until justice is served. We will continue with the campaign at the ground level. Currently, we are using the ongoing hearings for the national budget for 2014 to put pressure on government agencies to resolve the case. We will continue to dig up more information and use them as leverages to get the justice that Dodong Petalcorin and Kagi Lucman deserves.”

Calendar: Our first-ever wall calendar has appeared and it’s beautiful.  So far this week, we’ve sold 97 of them.  Have you ordered yours yet?

Campaigns:  Our campaign demanding the release of jailed Canadian John Greyson, held by the Egyptian police, went global and was publicized in a mailing.  It’s now up to 3,845 messages sent. Tomorrow we’re meeting with an activist from the UN staff unions, here to discuss efforts to weaken trade unions for staff at the global body — a possible campaign.

Berlin 2014: Last weekend I was able to meet with another member of the Berlin committee and discuss many of the issues around our upcoming conference.  I booked flights for my visit to Berlin next month where I’ll meet the whole committee and help take planning forward.

Photo of the day: I made changes in how we do the photo of the day feature on the front page of LabourStart in part to deal with problems that came up with our use of CloudFlare to cache our site.  But it’s also allowed us to do two things we hadn’t planned on — to pre-load a photo for a date in the future, and to show an archive of all photos we’ve had recently.

Correspondents: Every correspondent is given a default language and country, and while this is usually good enough, sometimes it needs to change.  Correspondents themselves now have the ability to do this after they’ve logged in.

Coverage of the British TUC congress: Thanks to Edd and others we have very impressive coverage of this and today will be doing a mailing to our UK list (over 10,000 addresses) to spread the word about this.

Our next book: We’re still writing the book and hope to have it ready in a few more days.  It’s hard to keep pace with the ever-changing world of mobile phones, but I think it will be a very interesting book.

Daily tech tips for trade unionists: A series I started on my blog which may be of interest to LabourStart correspondents.  Click here to see the first few.  Please feel free to add comments and make suggestions.

Something I’ve been meaning to mention for a while: the Canadian Twitter feeds (more the English than the French) have not only been steadily growing in popularity since they were introduced, but we get a fair bit of positive feedback about them. Our tweets are regularly RT’d by the accounts in the names of national union leaders and we are often asked to tweet re. events (strikes, conferences etc.). And for particularly important events I get calls from union communication staff asking me to make sure that we tweet about the event as it happens.

Aside from the free food and t-shirts attending union events so I can tweet about it gets me, this provides LabourStart with a fair bit of attention.

It’s not a lot of work to use Hootsuite (or something similar) to start a feed that regularly tweets without any direct input from you. If anyone wants to start one for your country I’d be happy to help.

– Derek Blackadder

August is traditionally a quiet time and I was away for most of the month. Nevertheless, we’ve made progress on a number of fronts.

Campaigns: We’ve won a great victory at the Toronto Plaza hotel and were praised by the United Steelworkers for the work we did. Another of our previously Canada-only campaigns has gone live — we’re supporting the union demand to released jailed Canadian film-maker and union activist John Greyson, who is being held in Egypt.

Berlin 2014: We’ve announced the date and are slowly informing people about it. We’re not rushing this out just yet as some people will be wanting to get invitation letters to apply for visas to Germany and we’re not yet ready for (we’ll want a partner union there first). The committee in Berlin has already met a couple of times. I’m planning a first visit to Berlin in late October. I with spoke with ITUC staffers who are in charge of their congress and ours will follow immediately after theirs. It looks like we already have a venue for our event, which is great as still have about 8 months to go. One of the members of our Berlin committee is visiting London and we’ll meet on Saturday.

Twitter: We reached a milestone of 10,000 followers on 26 August. Twitter cards now working (see the explanation below).

Books: We have a new publications page advertising all our books and sales are probably just over 1,500 in the first 8 months. We’re working to finish the third book in the next few days, and are discussing one more for later this year and some options for next year. CreateSpace is still not being great about payments, but we hope to have this sorted out very soon.

Calendar: The LabourStart Calendar for 2014 is now done — we’ve ordered one copy to have a look at it before we go public with it. It’s a beautiful design and kudos to Edd for all the work he put into it.

Photo of the day: There’s a brand-new feature — we’ll now be able to pre-load photos for future dates, and to archive the ones we’ve run.  Derek is currently testing.

Internationalization: The Italian and Portuguese editions have been revived. We expect to spend quite a bit of time on building up the Portuguese edition and have secured some pledges of funding for this. The translators’ mailing list is now considerably larger with all languages covered and our campaigns are now routinely appearing in a large number of languages, with mailing lists growing as well.

News database: When correspondents login now, they can see their default country and language and the next step is to allow them to change these whenever they want. So if you regularly post news about, say, Canada, but suddenly have a lot of news stories from the USA, you will be able to change your default country on a temporary basis.

Travel: The next two months will see me travelling to speak at a number of trade union events. These includes separate trips to Geneva, Brussels, Cardiff, Berlin, and Kiev.

We’re holding our next LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference in Berlin.  Details coming soon.

Some highlights this month (keeping in mind that August is normally a very quiet month):

• We have finally reached 10,000 followers on Twitter – our global, English feed.
• More people are joining our group on Facebook (58) than liking our page (39).

Mailing lists

English: 81,907 [81,875]
French: 6,443 [6,413]
Spanish: 4,905 [4,886]
Italian: 4,017 [4,021]
German: 3,312 [3,295]
Turkish: 3,283 [3,284]
Norwegian: 2.433 [2,441]
Russian: 2,051 [2,049]
Dutch: 1,377 [1,359]
Chinese: 1,011 [1,011]
Finnish: 577 [575]
Japanese: 334 [334]
Arabic: 313 [313]
Polish: 282 [282]
Tagalog: 254 [253]
Portuguese: 248 [245]
Hebrew: 215 [217]
Farsi: 207 [207]
Swedish: 195 [195]
Korean 154 [154]
Indonesian: 153 [152]
Danish: 137 [137]
Czech: 88 [88]
Thai: 68 [68]
Greek: 60
Esperanto: 55 [52]
Hindi: 40 [39]
Slovak: 19 [19]
Bulgarian: 19
Creole: 13
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 10,033 [9,936]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,832 [7,793]
Members of LabourStart group: 5,689 [5,631]
Like LabourStart page (French): 329 [324]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 126 [124]
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 97 [94]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,610 [5,594]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,383 [1,376]

Union group on Flickr: 732 [729]

Website

Correspondents: 670 [665]

I’ve been asked to speak about LabourStart’s experiences with online campaigning at the national communicators conference that UFCW holds every few years. I’ve done this in the past and they are still one of our largest donors here in Canada. 🙂

I have a standard presentation that I modify for each such presentation so if anyone else is doing or thinking about doing something similar and would like to use it or parts of it just let me know and I can send it along. These kind of events are, I think, very good for us.

– Derek Blackadder