Inside LabourStart

Campaigns: We launched two new campaigns this week, both focussing on Asia. One is in defense of labour rights activist Andy Hall, threatened with jail and a multi-million dollar fine in Thailand. The other is in support of Hong Kong’s dockworkers, on strike for more than a week. We added a graphical link to Reddit which you can see on the Hong Kong campaign — we’ll be working to make this more useful in the next few days.

Helping our friends: We devoted one of our mass mailings in English last week to promoting — for a second time — the IUF’s current campaign targetting Mondelez (Kraft) for its violations of workers rights in Tunisia and Egypt. As a result of that extra push, we helped this turn into the largest online campaign the IUF has ever run. We also gave a special push to Radio Labour last week, timing the launch of the Andy Hall campaign to coincide with an interview they did with him. The result was a record 4,000 listeners to the interview. We also helped three GUFs (ITF, UNI and IndustriALL) as well as our correspondents by sharing with them (the correspondents) details of three new jobs at the GUFs in campaigns and communications.

Our home page: The photo of day/week is no longer a fixed height, as Derek requested. And I’ve publicized the 9 logos Masha prepared for us to correspondents by email, getting a lot of comments. We’ll make a decision soon.

Our second book: A first draft is now ready and we hope to have the book in hand in time for our May Day party in London.

Internationalization: We now have a mailing list in Thai (46 names) and will soon begin mailing to it. We have the beginnings of a LabourStart Facebook page in Hebrew as well.

Fundraising: We did a mailing last Wednesday to 12,867 “power campaigners” — people who have supported at least 5 of our campaigns in the last year. We asked each person to donate $50 to LabourStart and I set myself the fairly randomly-chosen goal of hoping that we’d get 1% of that list to give an average of $50 each — for a total of £4,271. We reached over 95% of that target by this morning, less than five days after the fundraising campaign began. We are also continuing to build for the LabourStart May Day party/fundraiser in London on May 4th. 162 people have said they are either coming (80) or thinking of coming (82).

Publicity: We had a very complimentary article appear in the German newspaper Woz (see details below).

Survey: We sent out a summary of the results of our annual survey of trade union use of the net to all our readers.

Mailing list migration: We’ve nearly completed the migration of our mailing lists from MailChimp to Sendy. Still working on the issue of templates, and for the moment, French and English lists remain on MailChimp, costing us a small fortune every month.