Inside LabourStart

This is shaping up to be the biggest campaign we’ve ever run — and we’ve only just scratched the surface.

As I write these words, we’re at 7,463 9,184 messages sent.

But we can easily reach the figure of 10,000 and if we’re any good at this campaigning thing, much more than that.

Keep these numbers in mind:

• CUPW – the union whose very existence is being threatened – has 54,000 members, and that’s not counting family members.
• The Canadian Labour Congress represents 3,200,000 members
• UNI Global Union’s Post and Logistics Sector represents 2,500,000 postal workers in 157 unions
• Britain’s Communication Workers Union alone represents 210,000 workers, many of them employed by the Royal Mail
• The US’s National Association of Letter Carriers has 300,000 members
• The American Postal Workers Union, also in the USA, has 330,000 members
• 90% of the people on LabourStart’s mailing lists – another 63,000 trade unionists – have not yet signed up to this campaign

So let’s be ambitious — the sky’s the limit!

It’s been more than a year since we had a campaign with more than 5,000 supporters – and we have one again now, thanks to the Canada Post and its effort to crush the union.  This campaign broke the 5,000 barrier within 72 hours of launch.

We’re closing down the Canada-only campaign and focussing on this.  The campaign already has 3,224 supporters – even before we do the global mass mailing!

The Vale Inco campaign we waged in 2010 was one of the largest we ever did. Now we’ve been asked to do another, this time focussing on union busting in Colombia. The ICEM and IMF should be behind this one as well. The campaign is now live, here.

Oh, Canada.

At the request of the postal workers’ union (CUPW), we’ve launched this campaign.

At the moment, it’s Canada only, and even before we did our 8,000+ mass mailing this morning, it already had nearly 500 messages sent.

This could be a big one, part of a broader issue of the Tory government assault on unions.

We’re talking with others (including the CLC and UNI) about expanding, and possibly going global with this.

It’s now time to begin actually registering people for our conference.  Today I’m beginning publicity for the English language version of the form (still waiting to hear from the Turkish comrades about a translation).  Here is how I’ve publicized this form today:

1. Personal status update on UnionBook
2. Posted to my personal Twitter feed
3. Posted to my personal Facebook status
4. Posted to my pesonal Linked In status
5. Posted as a LabourStart tweet
6. Posted to the LabourStart Facebook page
7. Posted to the Wall of the LabourStart Facebook group
8. Posted as an ad across the top of UnionBook
9. Wrote to all 80 who indicated on Facebook that they would attend
10. Wrote to all 151 who indicated on Facebook that they might attend
11. Posted to the wall of the conference Facebook event
12. Wrote to all 4,373 members of the LabourStart Facebook group
13. Wrote to nearly 700 LabourStart correspondents

I cracked the problem of the conference registration script this morning – we’ll begin publicizing this far and wide tomorrow, but feel free to register today if you want: http://www.labourstart.org/2011/?page_id=57

Campaigns: I’ve done a mass mailing to our English list announcing the two new campaigns (Russia, El Salvador) and the release of Rosalba in Colombia (subject of a campaign of ours last winter). We also promoted Amnesty International’s Iran campaign, the ITUC annual survey, and a contest sponsored by UCS.  Last week we suggested a super-campaign to the ITUC based around their annual survey, but we’ve gotten no answer from them. We’ve gotten permission to close down the Chile campaign after 3 months and have asked permission to close down the Botswana one as the strike is now over.  Once again at the request of the RMT union we launched a UK-specific campaign and did a mailing to the more than 5,000 UK subscribers on our lists.  Nearly 700 messages have already been sent.

Conference: Work continues on the conference registration – I’ve gotten stuck on a bit of code and have been asking for help.  Made some progress today and hope to have this settled tomorrow so that we can begin registering people.  The problem has to do with the interaction between the Perl scripting language and a MySQL database.  I tested out Ustream, which integrates with Ning (UnionBook) as a way of doing video podcasts for the conference, but while it worked, the advertising was incredibly annoying, so I’ll be trying out different software instead.  Had a long Skype conference call with the Solidarity Center about the participation of Middle East and North African trade unionists at our event.

Fundraising: As the USA was lagging far behind other countries, I wrote to some of our friends in the American labour movement and have gotten some positive responses.  The total raised so far (including some money which has been pledged but not yet received) is £15,341 — a nearly 40% increase over last year.

UnionBook: I wrote to all UB members telling them how things were going with our drive to recruit new members – trying to reach a goal of 5,000 by 4 September.  While the site is growing, it’s not growing fast enough to meet that goal.  18 new members joined today, and another 18 yesterday.

The ITUC has issued its annual report on the violations of trade union rights.   It’s important that we do all we can to promote this — in all our languages and in all countries.  Here are some of the things I’m doing today:

• Promoting this in a LabourStart mass mailing later today
• Posted it to the LabourStart page on Facebook
• Posted it as a tweet – as LabourStart
• Posted it on UnionBook – and then automatically through my personal account to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn

Other correspondents have already made sure it’s a top news story on LabourStart today.

What have you done?

Including four pledges by unions in the UK and Australia, we’re now just over £13,000 — which is £1,500 more than we raised in 2010.  Let’s keep up the momentum!  Here are the breakdowns by country:

• Australia – £5,791
• Canada – £3,119
• UK – £2,007
• Other – £1,104
• USA – £525
• Germany – £180
• Ireland – £154
• New Zealand – £121