We’ve been given permission to suspend our current Iraq campaign. The GFIW tells us: “The situation in Iraq is quiet now–re trade unions rights- since May-June upheaval and the ITUC, TUC and ILO intervention. The oil union leader in Kirkuk, thanks to the labourstart Campaign, has not been relocated, al though the risk of being relocated is still hanging over his head.” By the end, the campaign got 3,430 messages sent – making it one of the larger recent campaigns.

Our conference opens in Istanbul in another 14 weeks and 2 days, and while of course there is still an enormous amount to do, we have made some progress.  Today I’d like to focus on what’s gone right so far:

• We have a steering committee up and running in Istanbul and I’m confident that they’ll do an excellent job.  I will meet with them on 7 September.
• We now have a conference hotel at a great price – more details coming soon.
• We secured a great conference venue – at Petrol-Is, the oil workers union.
• 108 people have registered so far – 40 of them say they can pay their own way.  Of those 40, 29 are from outside Turkey, so those plus the ones we expect via the Solidarity Center bring us up to nearly 40 — getting very close to our goal of 50 participants from outside Turkey.
• We have a significant number of workshop proposals which we need to refine and finalize.
• We have tentative commitments from one, possibly two, very senior international trade union leaders to speak at the event.
• At the meeting of global union federations in Istanbul in September, we have a slot to talk about the conference and to encourage participation from GUFs.  We already have commitments for participation from the IUF, IMF, ITF, and others.

Let’s spread the word – this is not going to be an easy one to build, both because of the subject and the timing (August).  Click here to send your message today:

http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=1074

Conference: We’ve jumped from 69 to 85 registrants – and now have 11 from the UK, due to a special mailing I did.  The Solidarity Center is now telling us we should have 8 participants from 4 Arab countries as well.

Campaigns: Vale Colombia is now closed.  Malawi one should launch today.

Newswires: I’ve been doing a lot of work on the regional newswires, which had not been working for a very long time.  Most of them are now working fine.  I’ll give a full update when complete.

Absence: Early warning – I will be away from my desk from 15-30 August with only very limited email access (and none at all during the first week).

If you posted a news story that had a double quote in the title, e.g. Union calls for “unlimited” strike action, it was likely to save this to our database as Union calls for.

In other words, it would break the line at the first double quote it encountered.

I have now fixed this – it substitutes the single quote, so if you key in Union calls for “unlimited” strike action it will save this to our database and render it is Union calls for ‘unlimited’ strike action.

18 killed in Malawi protests - global unions take action.

It’s August, schools are closed, many trade union offices are working with skeletal staffs.  (At least in Europe.)  And yet we have a steady flow of requests for new campaigns, updates on existing ones, and so forth.

According to a report we got from the United Steelworkers in North America, “the union at Vale in Colombia advised would be best to stop LS email campaign for now.”

Meanwhile, expect a new campaign relating to Malawi – see this ITUC press statement.

With little more than 100 days to go, we need to work hard now to make sure that our conference is a success.

At the moment, I’m most concerned about turnout. As of this morning, we had 69 people registered – of these 7 were from Turkey and 62 from abroad.

Our target for the conference is 200 – 150 from Turkey and 50 from abroad.

And that’s not all the bad news — only 20 of those who have registered say they can pay their own way.

Obviously, we’ll have many more people attending than that. We have a commitment to bring in about 10 from the Middle East and North Africa region. Even members of our Turkish steering committee have not registered to attend yet. So realistically, we have closer to 40-50 who will certainly attend. The biggest problem is going to be mobilizing a large turnout from Turkey.

Every day for the next two weeks I will doing what I can to build attendance. Here are some of the things I did today:

• Wrote again to every national trade union center in the region, and to key partner NGOs we have worked with, re-inviting them and pointing out that they can now register online.
• Wrote to the Turkish steering committee about these problems.
• Wrote to LabourStart senior correspondents focussing on their regions, asking what we can do to build interest.
• Make a list of another half-dozen ideas, including specific unions/countries/individuals to target.
• Posted a reminder to Facebook event, which 286 people have said they will attend or might attend.  I will be following up with another mailing via Facebook to all of them, as well as regular updates to the event page.

I’ll keep you informed.  But for the moment, the number to watch is this one:

69

Nine days ago I launched a major Facebook ad campaign to promote LabourStart which I am today suspending. Here are the numbers:

• 563 more people liked our Facebook page
• 1,260 clicked on the link
• 198,359 individuals saw the ad
• 138,838 people saw the ad with the names of their friends who like LabourStart
• Total cost: US$ 832.83 (£506.60)

The actual number of people who ‘like’ our FB page has grown from 1,710 to 2,330, a gain of 620 (36%) during this period.

Of these 620 individuals, 563 appear to have come from the ad campaign and another 57 through other means.

When I launched the campaign ten days ago, I showed a list of 50 unions and campaigning organizations and how many FB fans they had; we were 24th on that list. Today — without checking how others are doing — we’re probably 18th. Here’s the revised list (numbers for other groups are not updated):

Global – Avaaz 231,994
USA – Moveon.org 152,151
Global – Human Rights Watch 139,571
Global – Amnesty International 49,171
UK – 38 Degrees 31,002
USA – AFL-CIO 28,918
Australia – GetUp! 18,299
UK – False Economy 10,400
USA/Canada – SEIU 8,989
USA/Canada – USW 5,955
USA – Labor Notes 5,419
Germany – IG Metall 5,258
Germany – ver.di 3,457
USA – Young Trade Unionists 2,769
USA – IWW Starbucks Workers Union 2,624
Global – UNI Global Union 2,511
Israel – Histadrut 2,448
Global – LabourStart 2,330
UK – TUC 2,048
UK – Unite 1,897
UK – UNISON 1,892
Global – ITUC 1,860
Global – Clean Clothes Campaign 1,828
Australia – AWU 1,777
Global – LabourStart 1,710

See here – and please promote widely.