Inside LabourStart

Conference: Registrations now up to 111; a gain of 50 in the last 7 days.  The Australian Council of Trade Unions has been publicizing.  An agenda is now agreed and nearly ready for circulation.  International guests are expected to attend from the UK, Turkey, Russia, Norway, the USA, the Philippines, Fiji, Taiwan, China, New Zealand and Timor l’Este, and maybe more — at least a dozen countries represented.  During the week, I had Skype calls with both Andrew Casey and Peter Lewis in Sydney to discuss conference progress.  Members of the organizing committee have been receiving a daily email from me updating them as we rapidly approach the conference opening.  The conference has an event page on Facebook.

Intern: Interviews took place last Monday, 22 October; each of the four shortlisted interns was then asked to complete a written test (to draft a plan for a new LabourStart campaign).  The result of all this is that our new intern, Edd Mustill, has begun work 3 days a week in the office.  Say hello to Edd – intern@labourstart.org.

Campaigns: We launched a new campaign yesterday demanding the release of two teacher trade union leaders in Bahrain; it took off very quickly and within less than 20 hours had generated 4,544 messages.  (The campaign is already larger than our China NGOs campaign, which was launched 18 days ago..)  We also did a promotion of our Zimbabwe campaign, which had stalled at under 4,700.  It’s picked up another 800 supporters thanks to our additional effort.

Books: I had a short meeting in London with David Prosten, owner of Union Communication Services.  David’s not only our partner bookseller for the Labour Book of the Month, but he’ll also be publishing my next book on unions and the internet, due out next year.