Inside LabourStart

The new face of Radio LabourStart, R.I.P.

As Marc Belanger has correctly pointed out, Radio LabourStart has for some time now served to direct traffic to Radio Labour – and nothing else.

Our volunteer correspondents have not been posting links to other MP3 files – even though some of those correspondents are themselves the owners of radio labour stations and should have been using our facility to publicize their programs.

(Search this page for the word ‘radio’ to see what I mean.)

As a result, I’ve suspended Radio LabourStart and it now redirects all traffic to Radio Labour.

There’s also now a good-sized graphical link to Radio Labour on our front page.

New country - new possibilities.

There’s a new country in the world – South Sudan (this is their flag).

At the moment we don’t have any correspondents there, and no readers (that we know of), and a quick scan showed no current labour news.

But we’re ready for all of the above, as ‘South Sudan’ is now one of the choices for news stories in our database, and for participants in our online campaigns.

If there are any other countries you know of that we’ve missed, let me know and we’ll fix it.

Meanwhile, we have successfully launched our first campaign in Hebrew — here.  You should see something like this in your browser:

We hope this will also be our first campaign to appear in Hebrew – to reach out to Israeli workers.

The Swaziland campaign was suspended today after 3 months online – and a disappointing 2,357 messages sent. (We’re waiting to hear from the ITUC what effect, if any, it had on the ground.)

This leaves us with six active campaigns, listed in order of popularity:

• Georgia 3,596
• Iraq 3,406
• Botswana 3,357
• Colombia 2,807
• Korea 2,683
• Russia 1,690

This means that the Georgia campaign, launched only 3 weeks ago, is the one most likely to reach 5,000, making it one of our larger campaigns.

This only makes sense if you read the article.

.net Magazine, the world’s best-selling magazine for web designers and developers, has devoted two pages of the Summer 2011 issue (which went on sale today) to a make-over of LabourStart.  The makeover was done by one of the UK’s top design firms – twentysixdigital.  (Their clients include the Royal Marines and the manufacturers of Durex condoms.  Don’t ask.)

Unfortunately, at the moment, the article is not available for free online – though I’ve written to the editor asking him to make it available.

If that happens, I’ll share the URL with our English language mailing list and we can use their comments facility to have a discussion.  The only thing available online right now is a JPG image of the page – but without the explanation in the article, it doesn’t make much sense.

If you’re dying to read it, buy a copy of .net Magazine in a shop or online.  (The digital version costs £4.16; the UK the print version costs £5.99.)

We just received this from the United Steelworkers –

Movement at Vale in Colombia

After intervention by unions from around the world, there has been some positive movement in the struggle by Vale workers at the El Hatillo mine in Colombia who have organizied with the union Sintramienergetica. The Vice Minister of Labour called a meeting with the union and Vale.  In the meeting Vale agreed to negotiate with the union. The union is now waiting for Vale to name its bargaining committee.

In the meeting, Vale also took note of receiving over two thousand letters of protest from workers around the world concerned about Vale’s behavior in Colombia. Sintramienergetica is thankful for the LabourStart campaign run on its behalf.

After three months, I’ve closed down the Bahrain campaign – which came in with 4,693 messages sent and which appeared in 10 languages. I’ve asked the ITUC to tell us what effect, if any, the campaign had.

This is a good beginning – and today we’ll be launching a Korean language version of this campaign which will hopefully begin to build a Korean language mailing list as well.

This new campaign comes from the Korean Metal Workers via the International Metal Workers Federation.  It is, as we’ve grown to expect from our comrades in Korea, a very exciting one – an aerial protest in a crane lasting for months, police battling workers using liquid tear gas, arrests of activists, and so on.  Please do what you can to promote this – it’s urgent.