Inside LabourStart

This is from the union there following the closing down of our campaign today.

Thank you, LS and its supporters for this campaign. As you know the incident at Pleyade happened within a large campaign in the care sector. Unfortunately this campaign did not come to an end yet and several other actions took (and will) place. As for the Pleyade incident the LabourStart campaign lead to better awareness of basic trade union rights within union ranks. We have been in contact with ILO and are considering a complaint procedure. We also will discuss this incident with the Police union to raise better awareness amongst police officers. The reason why this has not been done yet is a simular pending case from our sister union FNV Bondgenoten at the supreme court of the Netherlands, the ruling is expected in April and it looks promising. We do not want to make to much noise untill the ruling is there. With a positive ruling, over 8000 protest global respondents, and a possible ILO ruling we think we have a great case to settle this once and for all. In the mean time members at Pleyade where very encouraged by the support and strengthend in their believe that their union did nothing illegal.

So the announcement could be that ABVAKABO is very grateful to all repondents and LabourStart. Although the case is not settled yet, LS encouraged the workers and contributed to a diiscussion on trade union rights in the Netherlands. It opened up new avenues to ensure basic trade union rights in NL.

We’ve had to change the PHP version for our website to 5.4 (don’t ask) and there is a slim possibility that something, somewhere might break.  If anything on the site doesn’t work as it should, please let me know as soon as possible.  Thanks.

Update: This broke the home page in all languages except English – this is now fixed.

Update 2: English was broken too.  Now fixed.

Annual survey: We’ve gone up from 500 responses to 2,082. We still need 872 more to beat last year’s record. We got an article on the TUC blog, Stronger Unions, which has helped boost interest in the UK.  We’ll stop collecting responses in just 13 more days — on 19 March.

Site re-design: I incorporated most of the comments made by comrades on what I did so far. Masha, who is a professional graphic designer, is going to suggest a new logo design soon — once we have that, we can go live, first with the English version. The draft site is here.

Campaigns: We launched our Turkey campaign and it’s already up to 8,613 supporters. We closed down the Bahrain and Netherlands FNV campaigns (see separate posts for reports.) Edd and I both did articles about the Turkey campaign for Solidarity and the New Left Project (a website).

Book 1 (Online campaigning): The French edition has been created and is available for purchase. Sales of both editions have now reached 611, with another 43 free copies given out, for a total of 654. We’ve now paid for ‘extended distribution’ meaning that the books (in English and French) will be available in bookshops and from other online retailers, including Amazon Canada.

Book 2 (Global labour movement): Edd and I are working hard on this one, aiming to get it ready by May Day. In addition to what we’re writing, we solicited submissions from a number of comrades and are pleased that we’ll have contributions from ICTUR, Amnesty, the Global Labour Institutes, the TUC and others. See more details here: http://www.labourstart.org/blogs/?p=2818

Internationalization: We’ll have campaigns in Slovak starting this week. All our campaigns have been translated into Esperanto and our translation group in that language now has 8 members. I’ve contributed an article (an interview, of sorts) for an Austrian Esperanto magazine about LabourStart. We’ll have a Korean interface for our news later today.

Fundraising: We now have a venue and date for our London May Day fundraiser – May 4th, 19:30 at the Bread and Roses pub.  Two months before the event, 77 people say they are coming or may be coming.

Public speeches: I spoke at the Unison Wales Women’s Development Weekend in Swansea on Saturday to an audience of about 26; I sold all 10 of the online campaigning books I brought with me. Next Wednesday, Edd and I (and Anita Gardner of IndustriALL) will be on a panel at the e-Campaigning Forum in Oxford. On March 31st, I’ve been invited to speak at a fringe meeting of the annual conference in Bournemouth of the teachers union NASUWT. In addition, Napo – the probation officers union – has asked me to run a workshop on social media.

Social Networks: We now have a page on Google+ which, according to our survey, is widely used by trade unionists.

App for smartphones and tablets: I’m completing one this week for the IUF and when done, I’ll know how to do the one for LabourStart.

The numbers in brackets are for the previous month. Strong gains are highlighted in bold.

Mailing lists

English: 76,322 [75,280]
French: 5,893 [5,922]
Spanish: 4,504 [4,392]
Italian: 3,888 [3,889]
Turkish: 3,116 [3,106]
German: 2,614 [2,586]
Norwegian: 2,369 [2,344]
Russian: 1,951 [1,935]
Dutch: 885 [803]
Chinese: 716 [708]
Finnish: 546 [187]
Polish: 318 [312]
Arabic: 252 [231]
Portuguese: 246 [243]
Japanese: 240 [230]
Hebrew: 208 [208]
Farsi: 207 [206]
Tagalog: 205
Swedish: 183 [183]
Korean 150 [143]
Danish: 144 [144]
Indonesian : 109
Czech: 96

Social networks

Twitter followers –
English: 8,659 [8,441]

Facebook –
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 6,327 [6,098]
Members of LabourStart group: 4,909 [4,884]
Like LabourStart page (French): 279 [267]
Like LabourStart page (Turkish): 92 [87]

UnionBook –
Members: 5,440 [5,417]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 1,194 [1,153 ]

Union group on Flickr: 720 [719]

Website

Correspondents: 613 [741]

My second column for the TUC’s Stronger Unions blog is here.

This morning we’re up to 1,982 participants – that considerably higher than in 2011 (1,336) but we still have a long way to go to beat last year’s number (2,954).

Following upon the success of our first book, Campaigning Online and Winning, we’re now beginning work on a second title.  The working title is The Global Labour Movement: An Introduction, and it aims to provide an introduction to the global union federations, the ITUC and others for our readers.

We are starting from the assumption that the average trade union activist will know very little about the global unions but it is increasingly important that they do so.

This will make our work at LabourStart easier and of course it will benefit the global unions by raising their profiles.

Edd and I have done up an outline for the book, a large part of which will be a guide to the various organizations, and we have some ideas for who to interview, who can write introductions and afterwords, and so on.

If any of you have any thoughts on this, they’re most welcome — we’re in the very early stages.

The book will be written over the next five weeks, with intention of submitting it for publication by 19 April — and launching it in London at the LabourStart May Day party on 4th May.

The Bahrain campaign, which ran well beyond the 3 month limit as we awaited news – still not arrived – of Mahdi’s fate, was closed today at the request of the Education International.   It had a total of 11,399 messages sent since its launch on 29 October.  It appeared in just 9 languages.

Meanwhile, our brand-new Turkey campaign managed to deliver 4,546 messages in its first 15 hours online — that’s about 300 messages per hour, or one every 12 seconds.

I still hope that 2013 will mark the first year that we have campaigns that top 20,000 — something we’ve yet to achieve.  Maybe Turkey?

This will be a big one – launched at the request of the ITUC, two global union federations and a European trade union body.  Let’s spread the word.

I’ve made the following changes – as you all suggested – to the new version of the website today:

• The site slogan is once again below the logo.
• Global news stories have a new title (not ‘breaking news’) and have been highlighted with a red border.
• The additional news stories line for each country has been bold-faced.
• The bottom menu bar includes links to correspondent login, applying to become a correspondent, and join the mailing list (this was already there).
• The icons for emailing us and the various social networks have been moved further down the page.
• The unnecessary ‘photo of the day/week’ header has been removed.  This would have caused confusion as we were never sure how often we updated this and we shouldn’t commit.

There is still more to do – making sure that everything that was accessible from the previous home page is also accessible here (e.g., newswires) and making sure this will work in other languages — taking into account that there significant differences between how the different languages work.  Masha has also offered to come up with a new logo later this week.  But we’re getting close, I think.

P.S. “The shock of the new” is a great title – I lifted it from here.

Thanks for all your comments on my previous post – this has been a good discussion and it should continue. Let me comment on some – not all – of the things that have been raised so far.

The logo: Some of you like the new one, some like the old one, some want a new one. Masha has offered to create one – let’s see what she comes up with. We’ll also need a square version of the logo (maybe just the letters LS) for Facebook and elsewhere.

Slogan: This appears at the moment above the languages, but I will move it to below the logo, as before.

Making the middle column more prominent: I agree it would be a good idea to focus attention on the main news headlines – but if we make this column wider, it also becomes shorter – leaving a lot of white space underneath. It also means the photos in the left and right columns become smaller. We could try a two-column format, or other ways to draw attention to this column. Let’s try out a few things.

Non-English versions: The English language version is quite different from most of the other languages (French comes close) and obviously the new design will not introduce radical changes into how the other languages work. If they don’t have a top priority news story like English, then this part of the site obviously won’t exist.

Labelling the columns: ‘Breaking news’ is not a good title – this is actually our ‘Top global news’.

Highlighting additional news stories from a country: We can bold face and change colour for this so people can see more clearly that there’s a lot more news for this country.

Missing menu bar: There will be one, but the bottom of the page, not on the left or right columns. This is where we can put a number of the most important links — for example:

• Correspondent sign-in on front page: This will appear somewhere, but probably not at the top of the page. (On the current home page, it’s buried in the mess of links on the left side.)
• Invitation to become new correspondents: Our experience shows that very few people click on this — we tend to get new correspondents because we ask people to sign up after they’ve submitted news. Nevertheless, we can add a link in the bottom menu.
• Newsletter signup: Our experience has been that very, very few people join our mailing list because of a link or a form on our home page; they nearly all come via the campaigns. But I can include a link with some other essential ones.

A WordPress theme?: This has been raised before by Andy and it’s not really appropriate, in my view. WordPress is a content management system – an excellent one which I have used many times to create union websites. (It’s even the system used for this blog.) But we don’t need a content management system — we already have one. In fact, we have several, all purpose-built for us. What we need is an attractive framework and while WordPress Themes offer these, it’s over-kill. There also many HTML themes available which we can use.