Inside LabourStart

Fundraising: Appeals have gone out to most of our lists and we are getting a good response both from individuals and some unions. According to PayPal, we have taken in £6,825.26 in the last 30 days, which is very good and most of that in the last 7 days. An additional £281.45 came in as bank transfers — we expect more, as quite a few requests for our bank details have come through, especially from Germany. In addition to raising more money, we are cutting costs. We will be migrating from MailChimp to another company, saving about 66% per month.

Interns: We have prepared a (partial) list of all our interns over the last decade or so, and will be reaching out to them. This is a group of talented, committed young people who have already worked with us and in some cases remain engaged already.

Programming:

• Another problem on our home page had been pointed out — when ‘all languages’ was selected for a country news page, it would only show the English story as the top story on the page. This has now been fixed.
• In addition, the home page in English has been tweaked to make the donation link more prominent and to remove the redundant link to our podcasts.
• We heard of a problem with the ‘today in labour history’ content which appears on the bottom of our country pages, but we cannot reproduce the problem.

Campaigns: Still no campaigns have been proposed to us. We looked into doing a campaign on Guatemala where a union leader has been killed and are waiting to hear back. This week, we also wrote to all LabourStart correspondents and translators asking for their help to find new campaigns for us.

News: In the first three weeks of June, 35 of our volunteer correspondents posted 2,392 news stories — on average, 114 per day. This is an increase since last week.

Fundraising: Facing a significant fall in our bank accounts, we put out a call for donations, including a mailing to our English list. In the last few days, we raised over £2,800 and are expecting more to come in. Comrades are encouraged to ask their unions to make donations if possible.

Programming: I looked into a complaint about the language selection drop-down menus, but could not reproduce the problem. Meanwhile, our pages showing state/province news have had a bug for years — clicking on ‘More news’ would show news from the country, not the state, and the display of the page was terrible (very small font, etc.) I have now fixed this.

Podcasts: I participated in the regular weekly online meeting of the Labor Podcasting and Radio Network, a US-based group. I learned that the numbers of downloads we are seeing is actually quite good, and will grow. I also learned that often the most successful interviews are with rank-and-file activists, and these sometimes draw larger audiences than those with high-ranking union leaders.

News: In the first two weeks of June, 32 of our volunteer correspondents were active, and they posted a total of 1,503 news stories — averaging 107 stories per day.

Campaigns: We continue to have no new campaigns listed on our home page. We have reached out to a number of unions, but so far nothing.

Campaigns: We now have no campaigns listed on our home page as we have now closed the Kenya and Myanmar campaigns.  Both ended with good results, as did the Egypt campaign which we closed last week.  We added new code to the home page to cope with this situation.  We continue to reach out to unions offering help, and today did a social media post across numerous platforms advertising our availability to help.

Fundraising:  Our appeal a week ago following the good news from Egypt generated just under £1,000 in individual donations.

Correspondents:  We wrote to 6 new correspondents (out of 16) who have not posted any news stories, asking if they need help.

Today in Labour History: We had a problem with one new correspondent not being able to login; this was now fixed.

We haven’t had a number report since November 2023.  With this post we’re returning to monthly reports.  This month’s report does not contain any new information regarding the mailing lists as we have changed the structure of the language segments and won’t report those numbers until next month.

The first number next to each item is the current total as of today; the second number is the total as of the first day of November 2023. Where one number is provided it means that there has been no change since our last report.

Lists or accounts that have shrunk are in italics.  Lists or accounts which experienced growth are in bold.

 

MAILING LISTS:

The top 10:

English: 84014

French: 7642

German: 5957

Spanish: 5979

Turkish: 4426

Korean: 3321

Italian: 3117

Russian: 2702

Norwegian: 2232

Romanian:  1771

Dutch: 1536

 

The others:

Arabic:  821

Belarusian:  293

Bulgarian: 17

Chinese: 902

Creole:  11

Czech: 61

Danish: 93

Esperanto: 190

Farsi:  207

Finnish:  476

Georgian:  156

Greek: 54

Hebrew:  295

Hindi:  80

Hungarian:  186

Indonesian:  460

Japanese: 398

Lithuanian:  63

Malaysian: 21

Polish: 970

Portuguese: 1292

Punjabi:  2

Sinhalese: 1

Slovakian: 15

Swedish: 950

Tagalog: 183

Thai:  152

Ukrainian: 493

Vietnamese:  21

Internal:

Executive and Interns:  14

LabourStart Correspondents:  677

LabourStart Translators:  97

Africa Caucus:  63

Media Contacts: 51

 

FLICKR:

Members:  839-840

Photos:  10212-10233 (after a culling of off-topic photos)

 

TELEGRAM:

LabourStart channel:  130-126

 

FACEBOOK PAGES/GROUPS:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.  Authority for the LabourStart Brasil page has been devolved to a volunteer in Brazil.

LabourStart.org page likes:  unavailable-14071

Global Labour News and Information: 9159-9094

LabourStart UK likes:  unavailable-2137

LabourStart Francophone: 607 (last post February 2021)

LabourStart-de: 500

LabourStart Brasil:  552

LabourStart Turkce:  2116

LabourStart TV likes: 443

LabourStart TV follows:  464-454

LabourStart Vostok:  119

LabourStart Esperanto:  18

LabourStart Canada-English: 173-17 (new)

LabourStart Nepal:  7 (last post April 2017)

LabourStart Israel: CLOSED (last post 2018)

 

LINKEDIN:

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers.

Group: 2622-2617

Page: 300-274

 

PODCASTS:

Rather than list each podcast and the numbers of times they have been downloaded we will report the three (3) podcasts that have been downloaded the most times to date.

1. Mar 27, 2024. Interview with Sally McManus, Secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).  296 downloads.
2. April 11, 2024. Interview with Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood about the strike by Amazon workers in the UK.  273 downloads.
3. May 8, 2024.  Interview with Khaing Zar, trade union leader from Myanmar.

 

X (TWITTER as-was):

A few months ago the Portuguese, Spanish and Canada-EN accounts were  devolved to volunteers in Brazil, Spain and Canada.  As a result changes to tweet frequency and format have been introduced.  This may have had an effect on our numbers.

No concerted effort was made in the past month to increase our numbers for these accounts.  We will have to start again or the erosion of our numbers will continue.

We experienced some decline in accounts that usually experience slow growth.  This may be the result of trade unionists closing their Twitter accounts and moving to other platforms (such as Mastodon).

Global English: 38328-40123 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 3k followers last December]

Canada English: 22604-24923 [A technical problem with a third-party account manager cost this account in excess of 2k followers last December]

Global Portuguese: 10413-10754

Global Spanish: 10517-10614

Australia: 10148-10342

USA: 5103-5133

Canada French: 3316-3325

Russian: 49-47

Hebrew:  50 (last tweet 02-2021)

Italian: 508 (last tweet 11-2021)

Swedish: 329-330 (last tweet 2016)

Indonesia: 341 (last tweet 2015)

French: 224 (last tweet 2018)

German: 120 (last tweet 2018)

Japanese: 21 (last tweet 2012)

Dutch: 12 (last tweet April 2012)

Arabic: 7 (last tweet May 2012)

South Asia (English): 28-27 Placeholder and not yet active.

 

 

Victory in Egypt: We suspended our campaign in support of the Mahalla textile workers following receipt of the news that the two remaining jailed union activists have now been freed.

Zimbabwe: We were approached by a union whose leader has been jailed and we reached out to the Education International. We’re now having discussions with them about how we can help.

New campaigns: We have reached out to a number of unions as we are about to run out of live campaigns. There are several good prospects, though we may shortly face a situation where we have no current campaigns on our home page.  I will be tweaking our home page software to cope with that situation.

Podcasts: We didn’t release a new podcast this week, though we do have one that needs some editing and will be released shortly. We have a number of people to followup with to ensure that we continue released one new show each week.

News: In the first 30 days of May, our 44 active volunteer correspondents posted 3,525 news stories, an average of 117 per day. This is a big increase compared to a week ago, as we added nearly 1,000 stories this week. The top 5 correspondents who have posted the most news stories this month are (in order) Derek, Eric, Patrick, Pat and Espen.

Fixed bug: Previously, when looking at news from a particular country, if you selected ‘all languages’ it would only show English stories in the top 10, on the left side the page. I have now fixed this to work correctly.

Clicky: We briefly used this service to trace hits to our site, but have not done so for many years. Following reminders from the company, I have now removed all references to Click from our site.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Macarena Grimalt Fernandes from Argentina. In the first 24 hours online, this podcast already had nearly 120 downloads. The five most popular podcasts we’re done so far were: Khaing Zar (Myanmar), Amanda Gearing and Darren Westwood (UK), Sally McManus (Australia), Carolina Dantas (Panama) and Olesia Briazgunova (Ukraine).

Reddit: We have begun sharing some campaigns and news on Reddit in addition to all the other social media platforms we use. These have been seen by, in some cases, many thousands of people; our first post had over 8,000 total views. For a number of reasons, our posts to Reddit are likely to have a wider reach than those to, for example, Twitter.

News: Our volunteer correspondents have posted 2,560 news stories in the first 23 days of May, averaging over 111 per day. This is, again, a small decrease compared to last week, but still a very large number of news stories.

Podcasts: We released our interview with Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), this week. It fairly quickly picked up over 100 downloads. The previous week’s interview, with Khaing Zar, now has over 220 downloads. We have one interview ready to go, and are trying to finalise interviews with trade unionists in Argentina, the US and Europe. We now have a prominent link to the podcasts on all our home pages, in all languages.

Kenya campaign: We’re slowly getting close to 3,000 supporters in what we hope will be the final days of this campaign, as the strike appears to be over. The union has asked us to keep it going a bit longer. The campaign is in 15 languages, and the ones with the largest numbers of supporters are (in order) English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian and Dutch.

New campaigns: We continue to reach out to unions that might need our help. This week, this included IF Metall in Sweden, where the Tesla strike continues, the independent trade unions of Belarus, and the Georgian Trade Union Confederation offering our help in supporting the pro-democracy protests.

News: Our volunteer correspondents posted 1,879 stories to LabourStart in the first 16 days of May, an average of more than 117 per day, a slight decrease compared to the previous week. This month, 36 of our correspondents have been active – we need to grow that.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed Esther Lynch, general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation — that interview will go live next week. We released the interview we did with Myanmar trade union leader Khaing Zar and in its first day online, it soared to 139 downloads, well on its way to being one of our most popular podcasts.

Kenya campaign: The Kenya campaign, launched at the request of PSI, picked up more than 1,000 new supporters in the last week, and appears in 15 languages — a gain of 8 languages this week. The union has suspended the strike but we’ve been asked to keep the campaign live for a while longer.

Panama campaign: We closed this campaign after more than four months online — it had 5,282 supporters and appeared in 12 languages.

News: In the first 9 days of May, our volunteer correspondents posted 1,082 news stories, or 120 on average every day.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign in support of striking health care workers in Kenya.  It currently appears in 7 languages and has 1,338 supporters.

Podcasts: This week we interviewed a leader of the independent trade union movement in Myanmar — which will go live next week.  We released an interview with Jan Willem Goudriaan, general secretary of EPSU.

Iran: The workers’ rights NGO ‘Free Them Now’ released a video of LabourStart’s Eric Lee calling on the ILO to refuse to seat the Iranian ‘worker delegates’ at the International Labour Conference next month.

Egypt: We also prepared a video for the CTUWS at their request demanding on May Day the release of the jailed worker activists from Mahalla textiles.  It does not yet appear to be live on the net.

This blog: After about 8 months of silence, we resumed updating this blog, with several catch-up posts this week.

LabourStart has been lucky to have had some outstanding interns over the last decade or more, and for the last few months — starting in September 2023, we have had four exceptionally talented young people working with us.

David came to us through the Global Labour University (GLU); he is a labour lawyer from Colombia and was very helpful with many projects, including an upcoming campaign in the city of Medellin.

We had three interns from Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) — Isabel, Erin and Salomée.  They all did excellent work on a number of projects as well as helping us with translations into Korean and French.

We will continue to work with GLU and the ILR school, as well as others, to help introduce a new generation of activists to the international trade union movement.