Inside LabourStart

With the way things have been going around here lately (such as running 12 campaigns simultaneously), a two-week breather between campaigns is a good thing.  That barely gives us time to complete the translations of the campaign and the mass mailings.  Once again, we’re doing a campaign together with Public Services International focussing on Latin America – this time on Colombia.  I hope that this time, unlike our previous experience, we will get a good response from members of public sector unions around the world.

I’ve been able to integrate both the current and archived campaigns into a single page so that now, once again, we’re able to view statistics for the 250 or so campaigns we’ve waged in the last decade.  Click here to see what I mean.

We’re now down to 8 active campaigns — which is far more manageable than the 12 we were at a few days ago.

Today I suspended the Kazakhstan campaign after three months.

This campaign like nearly all of the 2012 campaigns did relatively well in terms of numbers – 6,598 supporters.

It did far better than the Kazakhstan campaign we launched three months earlier, which had only 2,102 supporters.

Today is the first day in six months that there is no Kazakhstan campaign running on LabourStart – though there is still plenty of labour news from that country.

As I was travelling in the USA for part of this time, I have an excuse. Anyway, here are some of the things I’ve been up to these past 3 weeks.

Campaigns: I’ve closed a number of those that reached the 3 month limit, and launched three others. Our biggest campaign ever was launched during this period. I began work on a new system to allow others – senior correspondents, for example – to launch campaigns while I am travelling. I also did a full review of the last two campaigns and what’s been translated and what not; as a result, we now have campaigns and mailings done for Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish and Hebrew. I’m still waiting for responses from our translators for Korean, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish and Vietnamese. Ideally, all campaigns will appear in 18 languages, and we’ll mail to 18 lists.  As a result of these campaigns, we now have over 93,000 names on our mailing lists.

Social media: I dealt with problems that arose from repeated attacks on our Twitter account (now solved). UnionBook grew to more than 5,000 members for the first time.

Partners: I set up a meeting at the ITUC, to take place in Brussels next week. I continued fundraising efforts with GUFs and British unions. So far this year, nine GUFs have given money and seven British unions have either pledged or donated.

Conference 2012: Work continues in Sydney; our organizing committee there is growing and meeting regularly and we’re sharing information on Basecamp.

Today I closed the campaign “Turkey: Unjust prison sentence on trade union activists“, which we ran on behalf of the Education International. Unlike more recent campaigns, this one generated far fewer than 5,000 messages.

I also closed down the Fiat campaign, which reached nearly 8,000 messages sent – many of them in Italian. This was the largest campaign we’ve closed since the T-Mobile USA campaign launched last September.

I’ve also requested permission to shut down the 3-month-old Kazakhstan campaign tomorrow.

Today I closed down the Mexico: Support electrical workers campaign after only two months online at the request of the SME union. The campaign did well, with 6,725 messages sent, and it was the largest campaign we’ve closed since the ‘No more fear at T-Mobile USA’ campaign which was closed in December. This weekend I’ll be closing the campaigns set up in mid-December for Italy (Fiat), Kazakhstan and Turkey (EI). This will bring the number of active campaigns down from 12 to 8.

The Education International has asked us to urgently promote a new campaign in support of an Iranian teacher who has been sentenced to death. Though I am still travelling overseas, I have been able to do this – though much of the work promoting it will have to wait until my return to London later this week.

It’s not every day that we get asked to campaign on behalf of someone who we know personally – but that’s certainly the case with Egyptian trade union leader Kamal Abbas. Kamal’s organization, the Centre for Trade Union and Worker Services (CTUWS) have long been active LabourStart correspondents and I had the chance to meet Kamal and his colleagues during my 2010 visit to Cairo, and again in 2011 when he came to London. The decision by Egypt’s military rulers to jail him for the “crime” of insulting a Mubarak-era union hack is appalling. I expect this campaign to be one of the largest ones we have ever run: http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1287

Some headlines:

• Six of the mailing lists grew quite quickly – the Dutch list, for example, nearly tripled in size.  Lists that grew by 100 or more include the English (+1,242), German (+501), Italian (+476), Dutch (+449), Spanish (+338),  and French (+265).  The net gain on the non-English lists far exceeds the growth of the English list.  The total size of all the lists now exceeds 90,000.
• UnionBook picked up another 106 members while the LabourStart group on Facebook grew by only 8.  This means that UnionBook has 262 more members than our Facebook group.
• Our Facebook page continues to pick up ‘likes’ – we gained 338 new ones in February, a growth of nearly 10%.  (Last month we picked up only 150, so it more than doubled.)
• Our presence on Twitter, despite spam attacks, continues to grow quite dramatically: in recent months the English feed picked up 200 new followers each month.  In February, we picked up double that number – 399 new followers.  And our other Twitter feeds are beginning to slowly pick up followers.
• The group on LinkedIn continues to grow every day.  It was previously growing at the rate of 10% a month, but this last month it grew by considerably more than that and now exceeds 700.

Here are the totals with the last month (January 2012) in brackets:

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 68,656 [67,414]
French: 4,046 [3,781]
Italian: 3,522 [3,076]
Spanish: 3,389 [3,051]
Norwegian: 2,373 [2,357]
German: 2,035 [1,534]
Russian: 1,630 [1,600]
Turkish: 788 [787]
Dutch: 686 [237]
Polish: 305 [304]
Chinese: 304 [276]
Portuguese: 246 [245]
Finnish: 184 [183]
Swedish: 178 [180]
Japanese: 156 [137]
Danish: 107 [107]
Arabic 100 [97]

And just below the radar:

Hebrew 96 [96]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 4,981 [4,875]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,719 [4,711]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,953 [3,615]
Like LabourStart page (French): 137 [108]

Twitter followers –
English: 5,782 [5,383]
French: 101 [90]
Japanese: 15 [15]
Spanish: 14 [0]
Norwegian: 5 [0]
Italian: 5 [0]
German: 5 [1]
Portuguese: 4 [0]
Russian: 3 [0]
Turkish: 3[0]
Dutch: 1 [0]

Union group on Flickr: 676 [674]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 710 [607]

Website
Correspondents: 957 [948]
Unique visits to the site this month : 609,164 [638,240] – n.b., only counting first 28 days of February
Peak day: 27,716 – 21.2.12
Page views this month: 1,319,332 [1,301,326]

Three spam adverts were recently sent out as LabourStart tweets.

This follows on the heels of a previous attack, though last time direct messages were being sent; this time it is tweets.

Twitter quickly grasped that we were under attack and disabled the account until I changed the password.

Here is what I think happened: Immediately following the previous attack, I changed the password.  After this, we heard from Twitter that the account had been compromised.  Then I changed the password again.  I think this password was in fact the old one which had been compromised.  We are no longer using it.

I have deleted all the spam tweets and fingers crossed that this doesn’t happen again.