Inside LabourStart

Full details are here. We’ve been assured that people or organizations who have been nominated in previous years are allowed to be nominated again.

It’s been a busy day …

• All recent supporters of our campaigns have now been added to our mailing lists on MailChimp – we’re seeing signficant growth for the German list, which indicates that our campaigns are now being promoted there by at least one union.
• The mass mailing regarding our Egypt campaign has gone out for translation and we’ve gotten translations back already in at least two languages.
• I’ve done further work on our Wikipedia entry, including trying to create an entry for UnionBook but am encountering some resistance there.
• I’ve written to comrades in Georgia about getting a Georgian language version of our campaigns up – particularly the current Georgian one.  Am awaiting their reply.
• Mac Urata at the ITF has agreed to help us get a Japanese version of the campaigns up and running.
• On UnionBook, I’ve managed to sort comments in Groups in reverse date order – something which people have asked for.
• I’ve begun the process of creating a secure directory (URLs would begin with https://) on our site – this is needed if we use Facebook for some pages, which has been done for our French version.
• It’s been suggested that we could get an article about LabourStart published in a left-wing Esperanto magazine; I’ve asked one of our correspondents who speaks the language to take care of this.
• Using a service called Conduit Mobile I’ve been doing further work on a small, simple UnionBook app for mobile devices.
• I did extensive work on our newswires today, including getting the French RSS feed to work properly, reviewing the ActNOW RSS feed in French and Norwegian (now fixed), the Health and Safety wire in French (seems OK), and tweaking our new French language newswire for North Africa.  In addition I completed work on migrating all the regional newswires over to our new database – finally.

At the request of the ITUC, via the British TUC, we’ve just launched this campaign in support of the passing of a labour law in Egypt.

Just some quick updates on our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference in Istanbul.

• We received some three dozen requests for financial support – about half of them were incomplete.  I’ve written to all those who didn’t complete the form giving them another opportunity to do so.  The form itself is now closed.  I’ve shared a spreadsheet with details with our committee in Turkey and with several senior LabourStart correspondents.  We aim to reach a decision by the end of this week.
• The Solidarity Center is committed to bringing about a dozen representatives of the new independent trade unions in the Middle East and North Africa.  We should have details this week.  We’re arranging for a Monday meeting, post-conference, for them – in the Taksim Square area.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow is preparing a video welcome to our conference.  We aim to have it subtitled in Turkish.
• We’ve reached agreement on a list of workshops which we’ll publish at the end of this week. We also have an agreed timetable and more-or-less have settled on who will be the plenary speakers.
• We’re still looking into arranging transportation from the conference hotel (in Taksim square) to the conference venue (Petrol Is); this may be done free of charge by the municipality.  If not, we’ll pay for a bus.
• We now have three bids from different companies regarding interpretation – the first time we’ve ever had to do this at a LabourStart conference.  We’ll need to consider these and reach a decision shortly.
• The organizing committee in Turkey is proposing a labour history walk around the Taksim square area on Friday before the conference opens, and a possible concert on Saturday evening.  Details to follow.
• If you have not yet registered to attend, and not yet registered for the hotel, please do so now.

• We’ve resumed the book of the month. The next mass mailing will feature it. Today, social media was used to publicize. This month, it’s Joe Hill.
• ITUC General Secretary Sharan Burrow has agreed to open our conference with a video message. She can’t be there, but this is the next best thing. We hope to get the message in time to allow us to subtitle it in Turkish (and Arabic?)
• Our first app for a smartphone is nearly ready (within 24 hours). If you have a Nokia smartphone, let me know. We have submitted something to their app store. (The iOS and Adroid versions are in the works.)
• We’ve sent a long message to PSI about their Korea campaign with suggestions about how to revive it after two months online. Some 3,000 of the 3,200 messages were sent in the first week.
• At the request of our Russian comrades, we’ve now closed down the Valentin Urusov campaign. We may need to revive it later this year, as he is still in jail.
• We will almost certainly have a campaign focussed on India next week (in support of Suzuki workers).  We’re waiting for final approval from the IMF.
• Work on the upcoming Global Solidarity Conference is going well, if a bit behind the scenes at the moment. I have weekly phone conferences with our staffer in Istanbul, Eyup. This Monday, we’ll begin the process of approving who gets subsidies. I have made special efforts in the last week to encourage participation from Jordan, Palestine, Iraq and Georgia.
• We have a much more prominent signup form on our home page now for our mailing list (in English only at the moment). This will be an important feature of our site redesign, which will begin probably just after our conference ends.
• We have a new newswire for Fiji – created at the request of the Australian unions, who are using it.
• I’ve upgraded our Facebook group – not sure exactly what that means, but people now need to be approved to join and there’s a lot more activity there than before.
• UnionBook has reverted to much more staid colors after a pink and purple phase. No one seems to have noticed …

I’ve been posting this item today to UnionBook, Facebook and Twitter:

No to Amazon.com sweatshop: http://ning.it/oytoiU Yes to unionized bookshops: http://ning.it/mR9lGn Spread the word!

This week, I hope to begin targetted sales once again – there’s a new, interesting biography of Joe Hill out there which our readers might want to buy.

First, let’s keep this in perspective.  I sent out a mailing to 65,000 people with that as the subject line yesterday.  A very large number of them responded to our Georgia and Kazakh campaigns.  Ten (10) of our subscribers wrote back with messages supporting, to one degree or another, Soviet Communism.

I share these with you (below) because I find it odd, to say the least, that there are still die-hard Stalinists (who actually deeply admire Stalin) who are prepared to defend the USSR even now, decades after its collapse.  And I don’t mean Russians — I mean people in the West who should have known better.

So here goes: (more…)

I’m in the processing of closing down existing campaigns for Palestine and Georgia, and opening up new ones for Kazakhstan and Georgia (again).

The two campaigns we’re closing were not successful (in the sense that the employers and governments involved did not capitulate to our demands) but they were medium-sized campaigns with a significant presence on Facebook, and each of them were larger than the five previous campaigns — probably part of a boost we got from the very large Canadian postal workers campaign. Several of the currently-running campaigns are even larger than these, so there is some sign of sustained growth.

Here are the two new campaigns – Georgia and Kazakhstan.

I’ve just written to every member of UnionBook to announce the good news – the social network for trade unionists will continue.

But I’ve asked them to redouble their efforts (literally), aiming to recruit 6 new members per day (instead of the 3 members a day we’ve been getting in September) between now and the end of the year.  If we can do this, we can reach 5,000 members.

And I’ve suggested that each and every one of them use this as their Facebook status update today:

Union member? Fed up with Facebook? Join me on UnionBook: www.unionbook.org

Please do so yourself.  Thanks.