Inside LabourStart

This campaign may be live for only a couple of weeks – but it’s hugely important.

Campaigns

Bangladesh: The ITUC is proposing a new campaign in support of changes to the labour laws; it could be launched today.

India: We’ve been asked to do a campaign in support of Suzuki workers.  We’re waiting for an answer from IndustriALL on this.

Turkey: We’re up to 21,634 supporters for this, our largest-ever campaign.

Canada: Our campaign in support of brewery workers is rapidly approaching the 5,000 mark, which is exceptionaly good for a campaign in just one language, targetting only one country.  It was helped by the IUF promoting it in a mailing.

PepsiCo India: We helped the IUF promote this important campaign on their site, which is now up to well over 9,400 supporters.

Thailand: Our campaign in support of Andy Hall was closed, and we await news from BWI and UNI about the results.

International Training Centre of the ILO – Turin, Italy

I spoke yesterday at a seminar for trade union communicators from Asia.  There were 15 participants from a wide range of countries and for most of them it was their first exposure to LabourStart.  Each of them left with copies of both of our books.  I’ll be following up with all of them as individuals.

LabourStart books

Our total sales for Campaigning online and winning is 904 (78 in French, 826 in English), and for the Global labour movement it’s 427 (English only).  Of those 1,253 books, 92 were Kindle editions and all the rest, paperbacks.  We’re working hard on books 3 and 4 now, and will have more details very soon.

Fundraising

We did the quarterly fundraising mailing on Monday to our 19,692 core supporters (people who’ve supported at least 3 LabourStart campaigns in the last 12 months).  There were some issues with the payment system (until today, it only accepted one currency) and some people were confused about how to change the default country it was showing. Nevertheless, we’ve received a considerable number of donations, totalling £1,523 (US$2,283).

Labour history calendar

We’re now getting closer to publishing this and today are writing to a number of key LabourStart correspondents and translators in different countries to get the best 13 illustrations we can for this.

New home page

Edd has been working together with Espen and Andy to finalize the migration of our last two remaining language editions of LabourStart to the new format introduced some time ago in Englsh.  The Norwegian version is now live and the French one is coming soon.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains (100 or more) are highlighted in bold.

Highlights:

• We now have 10 lists with 1,000 subscribers or more.
• The Dutch list grew by more than 50% – a spectacular growth.
• On Facebook, our Group continues to grow – by over 250 a month – despite no efforts by us to promote it. Within a few days, it will probably even be larger than UnionBook, which is growing very slowly.
• We’re picking 9 – 10 new Twitter followers every day (doing almost nothing to promote this) and as a result, we should reach 10,000 Twitter followers sometime in July.

Mailing lists

English: 80,623 [79,267] +1,356
French: 6,162 [6,046] +116
Spanish: 4,750 [4,660] +90
Italian: 3,990 [3,957] +33
Turkish: 3,279 [3,209] +70
German: 3,199 [2,906] +293
Norwegian: 2,438 [2,407] +31
Russian: 2,046 [1,962] +84
Dutch: 1,320 [879] +441
Chinese: 1,011 [828] +183
Finnish: 573 [560] +13
Japanese: 333 [300] +33
Arabic: 312 [299] +13
Polish: 281 [313] -32
Portuguese: 244 [241] +3
Tagalog: 231 [232] -1
Hebrew: 209 [207] +2
Farsi: 207 [213] -6
Swedish: 196 [178] +18
Korean 153 [154] -1
Danish: 138 [143] -5
Indonesian: 141 [128] +13
Czech: 88 [89] -1
Thai: 68 [67] +1
Esperanto: 50 [39] +11
Vietnamese: 12 [12]

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 9.710 [9,435] +275

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 7,673 [7,172] +501
Members of LabourStart group: 5,433 [5,180] +253
Like LabourStart page (French): 318 [312] +6
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 112 [102] +10
Like LabourStart page (Hebrew): 83 [75] +8

UnionBook –
Members: 5,557 [5,530] +27

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,348 [1,317] +31

Union group on Flickr: 728 [724] +4

Website

Correspondents: 649 [640] +9

After three months and 9,105 supporters, we’ve closed down the Andy Hall / Thailand campaign.  Waiting to hear from UNI and BWI what effect, if any, the campaign had on the ground.  This leaves us with just 3 active campaigns one of which will closed in two weeks.  However, there have been at least two campaign requests that came in over the weekend.

Today we helped the IUF with their new campaign to compel PepsiCo to stop union-busting in West Bengal. The help consisted of a mass mailing and promotion to social media (including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Wikipedia). The campaign had 4,899 supporters and after 90 minutes of a LabourStart push, that had risen to 5,219 — a gain of 320. I hope we can get this campaign over 10,000, quickly.

Campaigns

The Turkey campaign has now reached an unprecedented level of support, with over 21,250 messages sent.  For the first time, German is the second language with 1,076 messages sent — a new record.  (This will be very helpful in raising our profile in Germany prior to our conference in Berlin next year.)

We launched a new Canadian campaign in support of beer workers in Newfoundland and Labrador.  It’s gotten over 1,530 messages sent in the first few days online – making it larger already than the UK-only campaign in support of University of London cleaners.

It’s been more than 3 weeks since we launched a global campaign, and as we expect to soon shut down the Thailand campaign (this week) and the USA Vancouver lockout campaign (in about 20 days), we may soon have just two live global campaigns running.

Next global solidarity conference – Berlin, May 2014

Eric, Edd and Gisela met in London on Monday in the first face-to-face discussion about the conference.  It was a very productive meeting and has been followed up with the creation of a shared Evernote notebook in which members of the organizing committee in Berlin and London are sharing ideas and information.

Publicity

Our list of press contacts continues to grow, and we now have over 80 journalists we’ll be writing to regularly.  If anyone reading this has email addresses of journalists who cover labour news, please share those addresses with us.  Thanks.

I’ve been invited to speak next week at the ILO International Training Centre in Turin, Italy to a group of 15 trade union communicators from 9 countries in Asia.  There will be people from unions in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka and Vietnam.  One of the subjects I’m expected to cover is LabourStart campaigns.  I’ll be giving each of the participants copies of the two LabourStart books and will attempt to awaken their interest in our project with a view toward recruiting more correspondents, translators, etc.

LabourStart books

Sales at last weekend’s Ideas for Freedom in London were disappointing.

The total sales CreateSpace reports on the Global Labour Movement book since its publication two months ago is 364 plus 27 Kindle editions, for a total of 391.  This doesn’t include sales from our office.

As for the Campaigning Online book, CreateSpace reports sales of 630 copies sold, plus 65 Kindle editions, for a total of 695.  In addition, we sold over 62 copies from our office and gave away at least 44, including review copies, so the total distribution of this book is over 800.  In addition,  the French edition of the Campaigning book has sold 78 copies through CreateSpace.

Fundraising

We just heard that a large British union has contributed £1,000.  Next week I’ll do the quarterly mailing to our 15,923 19,692 “power users” — the people who tend to support all our online campaigns.  The last mailing raised several thousand pounds, so I hope that this time we’ll do as well — or better.

Today in Labour History

We’ve made some progress in identifying a supplier and costing for the print calendar.  And we’ve made sure that for the next few weeks (until the end of July), there will be history items every day on our home page.

New home page

We’ve come up with draft home pages in the new format for the last two remaining languages — French and Norwegian.

It was a goal I set for myself on New Year’s Day: to have the first LabourStart campaign with more than 20,000 participants some time this year.

We reached that goal early this morning and as I write these words, another 111 people have signed up.

This campaign continues to grow and grow.

Well done to all the comrades around the world who have worked so hard to make this possible.

Campaigns:

The focus has been on Turkey, of course — our largest campaign ever and soon to be the first to break the 20,000 mark.  This week we launched a Turkey Twitter campaign in which hundreds of people tweeted the same message at Prime Minister Erdogan.  We live blogged developments, here on Inside LabourStart.  We ran a live feed on our Facebook page with reports from Ron Oswald of the IUF in Taksim Square.  A Greek language version of the campaign will go live today – our first-ever campaign in Greek.

The 3 Cosas campaign in the UK has been the focus of some attention as well — we’ve gotten a commitment from the student unions in London to email their members, thousands of students, many of whom are expected to support the campaign.

In Canada, we’re about to close one campaign and launch another one.

We raised the possibility of a Nike campaign with IndustriALL and are waiting to hear from them.

We followed up this week with the ITF regarding the Vancouver, Washington port dispute.  The campaign is now two months old and is just under 10,000 messages sent.

And as we do once a month, we wrote to all our campaign partners with updates and reminders.

Next global solidarity conference – Berlin, May 2014:

There’s been a lot of discussion by email about this, and next Monday, Eric, Edd and Gisela will meet in London to discuss.  We have draft 2 page conference document in English and German versions.  Matt and others have been scouring Berlin to find the best venue for our meeting.

Publicity:

As I reported earlier this week, we suspended the Facebook ad campaign.

We’ve begun building a list of press contacts in the hope of getting some coverage in mainstream (and alternative) media for LabourStart.  Within minutes of our first mailing yesterday (to about 70 addresses), the British left-wing magazine Red Pepper posted a very short version of what we sent them as a tweet to their nearly 10,000 followers.

LabourStart Books:

Sales remain slow, though have picked up slightly in mid-June.  We sold 11 copies of the Global Labour Movement book last week and 4 copies of the Online Campaigning book.

We have two more books in the pipeline both of which will come out in 2013.

Dormant languages:

As I reported, 11 of the approximately 30 languages on our website are not updated regularly. Edd and I selected the six most important (where we have mailing lists, or do campaigns, or both) in an effort to revitalize. We’ve recruited some new correspondents and will be checking to see if any of these pages have come alive. The next step is to deal with the other five languages.

Today in Labour History:

We’ve begun work on the next step of this project — a print calendar, to be available for purchase in Q4 of 2013.

Those of you who attended the LabourStart Global Solidarity Conference in Istanbul in 2011 may recognize some of the people in this photo.  That’s part of the organizing committee for the event.

The young man sitting on the far left of the photo is Gokhan Bicici.

He is the head of TAREM, an NGO that works closely with Turkish trade unions.

Gokhan played a central role in organizing our conference and he and I became friends.

Yesterday, he was brutally beaten and arrested by Turkish police as he was filming the demonstrations in Istanbul.

You can watch a shocking one-minute video of this here.

Please help us build the campaign – spread this URL around everywhere:

http://www.labourstartcampaigns.net/show_campaign.cgi?c=1840

This banner now appears on the top right column on LabourStart’s global home page in English.

Why?

I’ll go into much greater detail when I tell you about our next book, but basically we’ve always supported open source software, and in the past have helped promote alternative software to the labour movement and so this fits into that long history.

Firefox is part of the broader non-profit, free Mozilla project and is very worthy of our support.