Inside LabourStart

Improvements to ActNOW campaigns: There’s now a new field for inputting the photo which will accompany each campaign.  This will be very useful for the front page redesign (every campaign needs a photo) and the new app (see below).  The field we use for entering details about our partners is now partially filled in to make it easier for people; I will be writing to all campaign translators about this.

App for tablets and smartphones: I’ve made some real progress on this.  There’s really only one or two more things to do before we launch, which I aim to do by the end of February.  If you’re interesting in seeing what we have already, email me and I’ll send you a link to a web app that approximates the final version.

Twitter: I’ve been aggressively promoting the various versions and there’s a steady flow of people signing up as followers. In the last 3 days, the English Twitter account has picked up 76 new followers, and the Canadian Twitter account even more.

Interface for correspondents: For some time now we’ve had English, French and Russian versions of this — today I requested our translators in several other languages to translate a short file which will make things easier for our nearly 1,000 volunteer correspondents, many of whom do not have English as their first language.

Conference 2012: Andrew and I have had regular Skype calls; we’ve set up a Basecamp account from which we manage everything; we have a venue (thanks to the NSWTF) in Sydney and we have the beginnings of an organizing committee.

Conference 2014: I’ve had discussions with a potential LabourStart staff person for Germany to even now begin the work of raising our profile there, which is a pre-condition for a successful conference in May 2014 in Berlin.  I’ve also made tentative plans to meet with the ITUC in Brussels next month to discuss this and other issues.  They are aware of our intention to hold our Global Solidarity Conference on the eve of their congress.

Fundraising: We normally do a pitch to our readers in May, and we will do this, but I’ve been approaching unions even now to begin the work as our expenses are skyrocketing and we need to raise more money than ever before.  Derek and Andrew have done terrific work in the past in Canada and Australia; I’ve gotten some great commitments from British unions this year.  Anyone reading this who can help – please email me.

Tech problems – newsfeeds and Unicode: We’ve had problems with the Finnish RSS news feed – some characters not rendering correctly – I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to get this to work. If the solution I’ve deployed solves the problems, I’ll sort this out for all other languages as well.

Broken link on our home page: Derek noticed that the ‘Join a union’ link had stopped working suddenly.  This turns out to be our only program written in Python.  I have no idea what has gone wrong, but have contacted our web host, 1&1 Internet, and they’ll look into it.

Wikipedia: I update our page there every month, both adding new links, numbers and campaigns, and also monitoring to make sure the page isn’t vandalized.  Many people visit this page and we need to treat it as an important gateway to the LabourStart project.

New campaigns on the horizon: In the last 24 hours we’ve had three requests – from the USA, Peru and Italy.  We’ll see if we can find a way to stagger these and not overload our lists.

Every language where we regularly post campaigns now has a Twitter feed as a way to build interest in and support for those campaigns.

And if we have a home page in that language, there’s now a prominent link  to Twitter there showing how many followers the feed has.  All the feeds now have RSS versions, and Twitterfeed accounts which stream up to 5 new campaigns every 24 hours.

We should have a look to make sure this works correctly 24 hours after the next campaign launch.

The languages are English, French, Japanese, German, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Chinese and Portuguese.

I’ll be closing down the annual survey of trade union use of the net in another 5 days and sent a reminder to our list yesterday about it.  For some reason, this has become the biggest survey we’ve ever done.  Last year’s got what we thought was a good number of responses – the best we’d ever done, really.  We had 1,336 people fill in the forms.  This year, it’s already up to 2,668 – and still going.  Thanks to Derek for reminding me to do this, and to Andy for taking the initiative to do a French version.  More details soon.

At the request of UNI Global Union, we’re launching a campaign together with the FNV in support of striking Dutch cleaners. Let’s hope this is a big one.

After two months, and at the request of the ITGLWF, we’re closing our campaign Pakistan: Release trade union leaders now today. This is the only one of the four campaigns we’ve closed recently that did not reach 5,000 messages.

Today I closed the Deri-Is campaign in support of sacked leather workers which has been running for 3 months on LabourStart. Like the GEA campaign closed yesterday, this one too had well over 5,000 supporters – though only a very small number of those signed up to the Turkish language campaign. I’ve asked the union for details of what the effect of the campaign was, and if there was any response from the employer or any change on the ground.

Some headlines:

1. Five of the top six mailing lists have grown very well in the last month – especially Italian, Spanish and Russian which grew by a combined total of almost 2,500.
2. All the other mailing lists have pretty much stagnated, though we have hopes for a big growth of the Dutch list this month.
3. UnionBook and the LabourStart page on Facebook continue to grow, albeit slowly. The former has picked up another 85 members while the latter has grown by over 150 new people.
4. We’re expanding our presence on Twitter, with new Japanese and German feeds already introduced and many more on the way. The English one is growing at the rate of about 200 new followers per month.
5. There’s been a huge boost — expected post-Christmas — in the number of unique visitors to the site. We’re now looking at something like 640,000 unique visitors per month.
6. The LinkedIn group – with no promotion whatsoever – continues to grow at the rate of 10% per month, and now has over 600 members.

Here are the totals with the last month (January 2012) in brackets (large gains – 100+ – in bold face):

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

English: 67,414 [66,576]
French: 3,781 [3,582]
Italian: 3,076 [2,420]
Spanish: 3,051 [2,115]
Norwegian: 2,357 [2,333]
Russian: 1,600 [712]
German: 1,534 [1,516]
Turkish: 787 [778]
Polish: 304 [304]
Chinese: 276 [276]
Portuguese: 245 [245]
Dutch: 237 [236]
Finnish: 183 [183]
Swedish: 180 [182]
Japanese: 137 [137]
Danish: 107 [107]

And just below the radar:

Arabic 97 [89]
Hebrew 96 [96]
Korean 93 [93]
Farsi 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook 2.0 – members: 4,875 [4,790]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,711 [4,714]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 3,615 [3,462]
Like LabourStart page (French): 108 [96]

Twitter followers –
English: 5,383 [5,180]
French: 90 [85]
Japanese: 15 [0]
German: 1 [0]

Union group on Flickr: 674 [673]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 607 [551]

Website

Correspondents: 948 [940]

Unique visits to the site this month : 638,240 [597,481]
Peak day: 26,170 – 27.1.12
Page views this month: 1,301,326 [1,370,129 ]

At the request of the International Metalworkers Federation, we’re closing the campaign launched two months ago targeting the German-owned GEA company which had locked out workers in Turkey. (The company is currently involved in negotiations with the union and the IMF, and acknowledged the received of many thousands of email messages.)

This campaign was the fifth one in less than two months to reach the target of 5,000 messages sent.

In the previous eighteen months, only one other campaign reached that (the CUPW campaign in Canada).

In fact, a glance at the last ten campaigns launched in late 2010 showed that only one got over 3,000 messages sent.

So campaigns are growing much larger – in fact, they’re pretty much double the size now they were a year ago.

We’ve had Twitter feeds in English (5,368 followers) and French (90 followers)  for some time now; this week we launched one in Japanese (2 followers) as well.

Today I began the process of setting up 10 more for all the languages we regularly campaign in.  (I’ve begun work on the German feed.)

The Twitter feeds, which we will publicize, will be one more way to get the word out about our campaigns in those languages.

LabourStart’s third annual Global Solidarity Conference is due to open in Sydney in less than 10 months time.

Andrew Casey is pulling together an organizing committee, so if you’re from Australia and are reading this, please contact him –  ozlabourstart@gmail.com – to get involved.

We’ll launch a proper conference blog in a little while, but for now will post updates here, to Inside LabourStart.

The Education International has asked us to close down the Bahrain campaign we launched only 7 weeks ago — and which had attracted a healthy 5,160 supporters — and replace it with a new one today.

The new campaign shifts the focus to the leader of the teachers’ union in that country (pictured), Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb.

This will be the first campaign we do which makes use of the new “src” tag, allowing us to see for the first time how people are coming to our campaigns.

Please spread the word.