Inside LabourStart

It’s been a while since the last update on our progress, so here’s a quick one with not, yet anyway, a lot of content.

Partly because of a strike at McMaster University we’ve not yet set a date.  But that should happen in the next week as it settled last Tuesday.  It looks very affordable, assuming we can do some effective, but not huge, fundraising.  We’ll get preferred rates at the uni by virtue of our being sponsored by the Labour Studies programme.

The only remaing, and the biggest and most frustrating, hurdle is setting a date.  We need a few days for our draft agenda (details to come), but in order to get some discounts on meeting rooms we need to have a few people stay in residence rooms, which means they must be empty of students, but there are other conference already booked for the inter-session period, plus we don’t want to conflict with the ITUC conference or the two major Canadian unions-and-tech conferences (CALM and LabourTech) or any major union conferences and conventions… you get the idea.

But we’re within spitting distance of having a date.  Then starts the fundraising and the detailed planning, so check in here regularly.

The contest is closed now, we’re waiting while the judges discuss the entries and select the finalists.  That should be done by mid-week.  Then the voting begins.

In comparison with last year’s contest we have more submissions (189 vs. 118 last year).  I think we should be quite pleased by the growth in numbers as a surprising number of workers with cameras are reluctant (embarassed) to make their work too public.  Hope fully as the contest continues the numbers will grow each year.