Inside LabourStart

The survey results are in.  81.7% of the 461 people who participated in our survey regarding UnionBook answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Should UnionBook continue?”

232 people (!) submitted comments — see below:

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If you search Google for ‘LabourStart’, the first two sites found point directly to our website, the third is our Twitter feed and the fourth is the Wikipedia entry about LabourStart. That entry gets a significant amount of traffic – 176 visitors in the last month, for example. Some people are clearly learning more about our website here. Which is why we need to keep it updated.

The article was first created back in November 2003 by me; it was updated by me a few years later, and Dave Smith has made sure we’re part of the Organized Labour Portal on Wikipedia. But we’ve not been good at keeping it up to date, or making it as informative as we can.

At Derek Blackadder’s suggestion, I have now begun to regularly update the page, and will be doing so at least once per month. The idea is not only to keep the numbers up to date, but to keep adding new references – in the hope of attracting attention to some of the things we do (like our campaigns, conference, competitions, and so on).

Anyone can edit the page, and I urge correspondents to sign up for a Wikipedia account — you don’t need to do so in order to edit, but it helps identify who has made changes. If you make changes, please note what you’ve done in the appropriate space.

If you write in another language, please do what you can to make sure people who do not read English can still learn about LabourStart on the Wikipedia. At the moment, it appears that our page is only in English. (To see an example of a multilingual page, go here and look at the left side of the screen.)

Valentin Urusov

The campaign in support of joined diamond miner Valentin Urusov is now closed after 3 months.

UPDATE: The campaign has been temporarily reopened for two weeks in English and Russian.

The campaign generated only  1,759 messages – but it should be noted that it explicitly asked people to use the ‘official form for e-letters’ on the Kremlin website, which will have reduced participation in the LabourStart effort.

Of those 1,759, only 56 were in Russian.

And focussed on one thing above all others: the LabourStart conference in Turkey which begins in another nine weeks (63 days) from today.

Expect to see progress on this from today reported on the conference website.

Yes, there are many other things to do as well (my Toodledo account lists 125 LabourStart tasks), but the conference takes priority.

UNI has asked us to launch this campaign today – Labor Day in the USA.  They sent us translations into German, French and Spanish, so we went live in four languages simultaneously.

Here are the totals with the last month in brackets:

With 5,294 supporters, the Fiji campaign is our largest currently active campaign after only a few days online (and less than 2 days after our publicity blitz).  Here are the totals for all the campaigns (in descending order of popularity):

• Fiji: Withdraw anti-union laws, respect workers’ rights 5,294
• Malawi: Respect Human Rights and Allow Peaceful Protest 4,595
• Palestine: Solidarity with striking quarry workers 4,019
• Georgia: Stop attacks on trade unions – respect labour rights 3,694
• Korea: Stop the prosecution and harassment of public workers 3,462
• Korea: Stop police assault on Hanjin workers, free jailed trade unionists 3,055
• Russia: Free diamond miners’ union activist Valentin Urusov! 1,741

Having just returned from 15 days away on holiday, there’s a backlog of 222 emails to answer, plus 95 LabourStart tasks on my to-do list.  Your patience is appreciated.

Update one day later: Now down to 179 emails to answer, and 90 LabourStart tasks, as of 05:55 London time, 1.9.11.

While on holiday I managed to launch an ActNOW campaign in support of the embattled trade unions of Fiji – at the request of the British TUC and ITUC. Even without the normally extensive LabourStart publicity, it has already gotten 2,184 messages sent and was translated (without prompting by me) into two languages. Today I asked 11 other volunteer translators to get to work on it, and am beginning our own publicity blitz.

Update: Following our publicity blitz, support is increasing.  Here are the latest totals as of 10:00 London time (Wednesday), 12 hours later  –

• 4,213 supporters
• 730 recommendations on Facebook

A lot remains undone for our upcoming Global Solidarity Conference – this will be my top priority in the next week. I leave next Wednesday, 7 September, for Istanbul, where I’ll be meeting with our Turkish comrades and we’ll try to fix all outstanding issues.

I hope this will be up later today so that we can begin registering for rooms. Stay tuned – watch this space.