Inside LabourStart

Following up on the call by the Newspaper Guild, a trade union in the United States, LabourStart correspondents are encouraged NOT to link to news stories appearing on the Huffington Post until further notice.

There’s now a page on the conference website which will focus on the 20 countries either bordering on Turkey or within 1,000 km of Istanbul — we will be contacting each of those trade union movements over the next few days and weeks and will update the page accordingly.  Done today: Albania and Armenia.

The conference is now less than 6 months away.  But we haven’t gotten a lot of responses to appeal for ideas for workshops.  The plan is to have 20 of these over the course of 2 days.  So please – if you have any ideas for subjects you would like discussed, please share them!  Email ericlee@labourstart.org with your ideas.  Thanks very much.

With little more than a week left to vote, we’ve had 953 votes cost.  Last year, 3,000 people voted.  Obviously, we’ll send out reminders.  But any thoughts on why so few people are voting this time?

We’ve been approached by a colleague who is working on something like that, a very interesting idea. We’ll have more details by the end of the month, including any role LabourStart might play.

We’ve gotten a handful of complaints in the last month from people who couldn’t fill in the form.  There have always been complaints – but we know that for thousands of people the form works fine.  But the number of complaints is now too high to ignore, so I’ll be investigating what’s happening here.  It could be related to the redesign of the form, and the problem may only occur on certain devices (e.g., the iPad).  More later …

Update: I’ve removed a bit of unnecessary JavaScript – this might fix the problem.  We’ll stay alert and see if there are any more complaints.

Our conference in Istanbul opens 6 months from today. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

• Set the date and found a conference venue (Petrol Is headquarters in Istanbul)
• Setup a conference steering committee in Turkey
• Created a basic conference website
• Prepared a simple flyer for distribution at union conferences – being distributed this week at the European Trade Union Confederation’s congress in Athens
• Setup a Facebook event to which people can indicate whether they will attend (198 have so far said ‘yes’ or ‘maybe’)
• Have arranged for a live television broadcast of the entire conference
• Have begun reaching out to partners who will help us with workshops and with bringing participants
• Contacted Istanbul hotels and will shortly produce a list of 3 that conference participants can choose from

Compared to previous events like this, we’re actually doing well, I think. But it’s important not to lose momentum. The way these things work, it’s suddenly November and nothing is ready …

Here it is.

• The British magazine .net selects a website every month and has a major design company suggest a makeover. In the June 2011 issue, that site is LabourStart (I suggested it to them). The company doing the makeover suggestion is an award winning studio.
• The last 150 campaigns we ran are now listed in the Our Campaigns page.
• My meetings in Istanbul last week around our upcoming conference were successful. I was also interviewed for the new Turkish satellite TV channel IMC, which wants to broadcast the conference live. Nearly 20 people attended the conference organizing committee meeting at the headquarters of the oil workers union – which is where the conference will take place. I’ve done a very basic flyer about the conference which will be distributed at the European Trade Union Confederation congress in Athens this week.

We’ve had 76 donations from 9 countries totalling £2,295.75.

This is slightly more money than we raised last year by this stage in the appeal – but fewer donors (last year we had 98 donors by this point).

The average donation this year is £30.61, which is considerably higher than where we stood last year at this point.

Here is the breakdown of donations by country (in pounds sterling):

• UK £897.00
• USA £442.95
• Australia £425.96
• Canada £280.67
• Germany £179.54
• Other £69.63 (Belgium, Korea, Spain, Taiwan)