Inside LabourStart

• When viewing a campaign now in a language other than English, you’ll see news from that campaign in the correct language  – and in English. This was requested by some of our translators, otherwise nothing was showing in the “latest news” box.  (Thanks, Lennon.)
• The pass-it-on code hadn’t been working on the new server; it has now been fixed. (Thanks, Kirill.)
• The “old” ICEM campaign (from June) has now been re-branded as an IndustriALL campaign.  (Thanks, Alex.)

Campaigns closing: We were able to close down 4 campaigns in this period – Bahrain, Mexico, Colombia and Thailand. None of them, unfortunately, was a complete win for us. And none were record-breakers in terms of the number of supporters. The number of supporters ranged from 5,533 to 8,525.

New campaigns: Kazahkstan and Turkey launched just one day apart.

Upcoming campaigns: We are still waiting to hear from the Korean Metal Workers Union and IndustriALL about a Ssangyong campaign.

Campaign “contract”: We agreed a text that is now shown on the page where unions request campaigns that spells out what we will do and what the union will do. Let’s hope it makes things clearer and easier, and encourages unions to do more to build the campaigns.

Campaign “cookies”: We’re now compliant with the European Union directive on cookies, I think. (See full report below.)

Campaign translations: We’ve sorted out the problem of both Arabic and Turkey in the last week – thanks very much to Erin, Molly, Eyup and Mohamed.

Campaigns – new server: Still tweaking things that don’t work as before. The list of current campaigns now works in languages other than English. There’s a problem with permissions for the file listing email addresses – hopefully to be fixed this week. The “my campaigns” link in mailings should now work for most languages. The good news is that we’re not getting tons of complaints that the server isn’t responding, nor is a campaign launch causing the old LabourStart server (with our news) to freeze up as it sometimes would in the past. And we’re not getting any threats from 1&1 Internet to shut us down. So all in all, a successful transition to our new eco-friendly server in Iceland.

Articles: My article on the launch of IndustriALL has now appeared in Italian on the website of FIOM-CGIL. Another article on the same subject has been accepted for publication by Solidarity in the UK.

FAQ: I reviewed and updated the FAQ page on LabourStart.

Brochure: I’ve gotten details of many graphic designers and we’ll soon get this thing printed. It should help us with fundraising with unions.

Donations: A raffle held at the National Union of Workers Officials’ Conference in Australia raised A$1,000 for us – a wonderful example of grassroots activity that I hope others will follow.

The ICEM (now IndustriALL) has given us permission to close the “Free Somyot” campaign after two months.

Headline news –

• 98,427 subscribers to our lists – we are only days away from reaching 100,000
• Growth of lists – especially English – is very slow, as partner unions fail to generate new supporters and we continue pushing campaigns at the same people month after month
• Twitter – over 500 new followers in the last two months
• Facebook page now only 101 ‘likes’ away from being bigger than Facebook group

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 97,538 [95,921]

English: 72,889 [72,726]
French: 5,701 [5,627]
Italian: 3,876 [3,883]
Spanish: 3,857 [3,775]
Norwegian: 2,424 [2,433]
German: 2,280 [2,195]
Russian: 1,738 [1,768]
Turkish: 1,280 [1,161]
Dutch: 736 [736]
Chinese: 488 [357]
Polish: 306 [306]
Portuguese: 247 [246]
Japanese: 209 [ 205]
Swedish: 196 [170]
Farsi 190 [188]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Danish: 158 [106]
Hebrew 155 [106]
Arabic: 140 [114]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,190 [5,144]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,767 [4,775]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,666 [4,495]
Like LabourStart page (French): 201 [195]

Twitter followers –
English: 6,719 [6,414]

The following numbers will be updated next month, unless someone wants to do this now …
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 693 [687]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 913 [890]

Website

Correspondents: 985 [978]

Unique visits to the site this month : 547,625 [630,351]
Peak day: 23,659 – 13 June
Page views this month: 1,206,879 [1,271,874]

This is a joint campaign by the ITUC and at least three global union federations.

After one day online, it had only 23 supporters – let’s hope this picks up after the weekend.

LabourStart will, meanwhile, do what it can.

From today, you’ll see an occasional pop-up on our campaigns (the first time you go there), which warns that we use cookies and requests your consent.

This is a now a requirement for websites that serve users who live in Europe.

You can see the same sort of thing on most big official websites, such as the BBC’s.

We’ll soon be implementing this for the LabourStart news site as well.

It’s ugly and intrusive but not including it is a breach of the law here in the UK.

Two things happened this week that show the way forward for LabourStart and that are genuinely heart-warming.

First, this from Australia: “At the recent National Union of Workers Officials’ Conference, we held a raffle to raise money for LabourStart. $1000 Australian was raised.”

And second, this tweet from the UK: “RMT-UK Annual General Meeting unanimously passed resolution of support for @LabourStart”. According to a senior LabourStart correspondent who was there, the resolution was proposed by the union’s Bakerloo branch, and was actively supported by its general secretary, Bob Crow. More details when we have them.

In the bad old days, we’ve have unions – including locals and branches – approaching LabourStart all the time, asking for campaigns.  And to keep the numbers under control, we’d tell them that we only do global campaigns, we only focus on big, serious issues, and we only work with global union federations and the ITUC.  That, we thought, would solve the problem.  Oops.

Today we have three campaigns being launched at the request of the ITUC and global union federations, with possibly more on the way.  As I launch them, I will update this page.

• The first one that’s ready is this concerns Kazakhstan – a followup to the deadly rioting last December and the campaign we did then.  It is also our first jointly-sponsored effort, with the ITUC working together with Russian and Kazakh labour federations.  The Russian language version will go live very shortly; let’s hope this a big one and helps get some justice for the oil workers there. UPDATE: After less than 4 hours we’re already up to 1,500 – that’s 375 per hour. If that were to continue for a whole day, we’d be up to 9,000 messages by tomorrow evening. Keep it up!

The following short draft is what I propose to put on the page where unions request campaigns. In filling in the form, they agree to be bound by what is written here. It won’t necessarily solve any problems, but it will at least make things clearer.

LabourStart’s ActNOW campaigns are a partnership between LabourStart and the union requesting the campaign. That means that each of us agrees to do certain things.

What LabourStart will do:

Upon receipt of a request for a campaign, LabourStart’s senior correspondents will discuss it among themselves and consult with the international trade union movement (including the global union federations – GUFs) if necessary. Campaigns proposed by national or local unions will almost always require — and benefit from — the approval of global union institutions. If a union is a member of a GUF, it is always best to approach them first and have the GUF propose the campaign.

LabourStart will setup the campaign in English (and retains the right to make changes to the proposed texts), arrange for its translation into a number of languages, and promote it to our mailing lists, via our website (including syndication through our newswires) and through social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and UnionBook. While the campaign is running, we will offer the union real-time reporting on support being shown, showing the names, unions and countries of those who signed up. We will run the campaign for three months, unless we are asked to close it down sooner.

Unions requesting a campaign from LabourStart are expected to do the following:

When proposing the campaign we will need a header, background text and default message; the union’s full name, logo and a description; a working link to a web page for more information; accurate and tested addresses for the target of the campaign; and photos to illustrate the campaign.

Once the campaign has launched, the union will do its utmost to promote the campaign to its own members, to other unions in its country, and to the global labour movement through any federations (such as GUFs or the ITUC) to which it might belong. Global unions will be expected to promote the campaign to their national affiliates. Promotion will not consist solely of a link on the union’s website, though this is obviously required. In addition, the union must use other tools such as email, social media and even offline methods to get the word out. The union must keep LabourStart updated, ideally by having a volunteer correspondent regularly posting news which we will link to the campaign.

After three months, the campaign will close unless a decision has been made to close it sooner. At that time the union will provide a report which we may circulate to supporters telling them what the effect of the campaign has been — not only whether the employer or government has conceded, but also whether the union members themselves were made aware of the international support shown to them and whether this boosted their morale.

LabourStart campaigns are offered free of charge.

If any of this is not clear, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

I’m closing the Bahrain, Mexico and Colombia campaigns today – bringing the number of live campaigns down from eleven to “only” nine. Full details will be here.