Inside LabourStart

A safe haven for our campaigns.

One of the problems we’ve faced in the past – and not only us – is that sometimes our web host, 1&1 Internet, gets upset when targets of our email campaigns begin claiming that they’ve been spammed.  Or when too many messages sent through our campaigning system bounce back.

They don’t want their server to be seen as a spammer or they could get blacklisted.  The problem is, when that happens they shut down – or threaten to shut down – the entire LabourStart site, which consists of a lot more than the campaign.

I’ve thought for some time now that we need to separate out the campaigns from the rest of the site, and a while ago even registered the domain name labourstartcampaigns.org, but we let that lapse.

This week, however, I’ve contacted our friends at the WebArchitects co-op in Sheffield (they helped get the original LabourStart newswires to work more than a decade ago) because they’re offering a very interesting web hosting deal.  It’s inexpensive and it’s based in Iceland on “green servers” powered by renewable clean energy.  And they’re touting Iceland’s commitment to an open and free internet.  You can read more about their project here.

I’ve begun testing and hope to have something working in a few days.  There will be a short period of transition, but I hope the result will be a more secure, faster system, and an end to the threats to shut down LabourStart.

As employers and governments sometimes make our lives difficult by blocking our email protests, it’s important that we have alternative ways to get the message to them.

Today, we have a new tool – an online petition that shows who has sent off a message.

You can see an example of the most recent campaign in English by clicking here.

To see a link for every petition for every currently active campaign, click here and then on ‘show as petition’ for the campaign that interests you.

The petitions are shown separately for each language.

How would we use this?  Our partner organizations can print out these lists and hand them over, or send by post, when we’re being blocked.  The URL is also readily available and can be given to the target.  We can basically say to them – you can block our emails, but you can’t block people from showing their support for the campaign.

UPDATE: I have fixed the security issues raised below.  Try to look at the petition now.

Mailing lists (greater than 100)

Total for all lists: 95,921 [95,403]

English: 71,816 [71,466]
French: 5,387 [5,070]
Italian: 3,877 [3,850]
Spanish: 3,707 [3,674]
Norwegian: 2,433 [2,430]
German: 2,160 [2,097]
Russian: 1,767 [1,761]
Turkish: 801 [796]
Dutch: 734 [725]
Chinese: 357 [344]
Polish: 305 [305]
Portuguese: 246 [246]
Japanese:205 [ 206]
Finnish: 184 [184]
Farsi 193 [173]
Swedish: 171 [173]
Arabic: 114 [113]
Danish: 106 [107]
Hebrew 100 [99]

And just below the radar:

Korean 93 [93]

Social networks

UnionBook –
Members: 5,100 [5,050]

Facebook –
Members of LabourStart group: 4,766 [4,721]
Like LabourStart.org page (English): 4,361 [4,217]
Like LabourStart page (French): 180 [146]

Twitter followers -
English: 6,199 [6,019]
French: 110 [104]
Japanese: 25 [24]
Spanish: 20 [18]
Norwegian: 9 [8]
Italian: 8 [6]
German: 7 [8]
Turkish: 6 [5]
Portuguese: 4 [5]
Russian: 4 [5]
Dutch: 2 [2]

Union group on Flickr: 682 [680]

LinkedIn – LabourStart group: 842 [792]

Website

Correspondents: 972 [966] – 7 pending

Unique visits to the site this month : 590,196 [677,769]
Peak day: 25,708 – 17.4.12
Page views this month: 1,289,430 [1,521,870]

This is a campaign we’ve supported in various ways for some time now, but ICEM has now asked us to do it as a proper ActNOW campaign: Free Somyot!

The Greek campaign launched in January has now been closed – it got just under 10,000 messages sent.

I know that several of us regularly conduct workshops related to online campaigning. This week I’m doing a two-day session for staff of the Canadian Union of Public Employees in the province of Saskatchewan on social media (broadly defined). A portion, about three hours, covers legal issues that are specific to Canada, but I think the remainder could easily be adapted for use elsewhere.

If anyone would like the materials, such as they are, let me know and I would be happy to share.

And if anyone out there has their own materials…

Some highlights of the last week:

Campaigns closing: The Peru campaign was closed down.  We asked about closing the Greece campaign, still waiting to hear from the comrades there.  The Canada (Acadia) campaign was closed.   The Netherlands cleaners campaign was closed.

Campaigns starting: We launched the MMP lock-out campaign for Unite on Tuesday.  We will shortly be launching another campaign in support of a jailed Thai trade unionist at the request of ICEM.

Campaign problems: Some people are still managing to send multiple messages to the same campaign using the same email address.  I’ve taken further steps to block this and will check to see if it’s working now.  I’ve also noted that increasingly our server struggles to cope with hundreds of simultaneous requests when we launch a new campaign.  I took some steps to tighten up our code (and reduce the number of steps one has to take).  We may need to consider moving the campaign software to a separate, dedicated server.  (There are, of course, cost implications in doing so.)

North Korea: I’ve begun work on trying to highlight the situation of workers in the hermit kingdom – and we now have a special North Korea page on LabourStart at http://nk.labourstart.org.

LinkedIn: Our group there continues to grow (842 members, with no effort on our part to promote this) – and they now get a weekly message from me.  Last week’s launched our May Day appeal for support.

Facebook: We’re seeing a huge spike in Facebook Insights – more people than ever before are forwarding on, commenting on, and liking stuff we post.  Our last “reach” is 21,232 in the last week; a month ago, it was 2,910.  That’s an increase of more than 700% in one month.

May Day appeal: This went live 6 days ago with a mass mailing to our English list.  Details on how much we have raised so far and how we’ve promoted this appear on the May Day appeal page here.  At the moment, we’ve raised £969 in 6 days.

May Day event: Our May Day event on Facebook has attracted 372 people; I’ve been able to message them and the more than 3,100 who have been invited by those people.  Hopefully, we’ll have many more by Tuesday.

May Day book: We’ve agreed to coordinate sales of a new graphic novel about May Day with our partners at UCS.  Details on Monday.

Union Solidarity International (USI): This is a new initiative by a number of British unions, spearheaded by Unite the Union.  The suggested a meeting, and I duly met with their coordinator.  They are going live on May Day and have asked to work with us.

Behind the propaganda, the reality is bleak for North Korean workers.

It’s “North Korea Freedom Week” – I’ll be you didn’t know that – and I was able to hear first hand from three North Korean refugees at a meeting at the House of Commons in London on Wednesday just what life is like in that country.   (There were also speakers from other groups, including Amnesty International.)  One of the points made at the meeting was that considering that the human rights situation in North Korea is so poor, perhaps the worst in the world, it is extraordinary how few people raise this issue.  The North Korean regime clearly benefits from the fact that so little attention is paid to violations of human rights there.

LabourStart is not alone in the international trade union movement in having very little information about what goes on in North Korea.  If you read the annual report on violations of trade union rights published by the ITUC, the section on ‘violations’ in North Korea is empty.  (It’s about 500 words long when it comes to, for example, Israel.)  The ILO’s committee on free association mentions Korea 38 times in its March 2012 report – but all 38 are references to South Korea, where unions enjoy a degree of independence some of us have witnessed first-hand.

Trade unionists around the world need to be made aware of the actual situation of workers in North Korea. Which is where we come in — we have look for information and get the information out there.  For that reason, as of this afternoon we have three countries called Korea in our list of countries where previously there was only one.  Stories specifically focussed on South or North Korea can now be separated out.  The first story about North Korea appears today on our front page — and I hope there will be many more.

As our campaigns have grown, increasingly people are finding that they get error messages after clicking on a ‘submit’ button.  I don’t mean error messages from the target — I mean our own scripts fail to execute.  Clearly our server is under strain when several hundred people try to simultaneously send off messages.  This will require a long term fix, both in terms of tweaking our software to speed things up, and possibly even moving the campaigns onto a different, faster server.

As a first step towards making things more efficient, I’ve finally removed the unnecessary second stage – the one where you confirm you want to send off your message.  It’s now a one-click process.  You fill in the form, and you get the screen telling you it’s been done.

On another matter, some idiot has decided to try to spam all our correspondents using our internal messaging system.  This will take a while to secure and to remove the spam content already sent (not all of you will have seen this).  Meanwhile, I’ve shut down the display of such messages until I can fix this.

I can’t really remember a time where we have started and finished so many campaigns in a single week.  Here’s a brief summary of eight campaigns in a state of transition – full details on the “Our Campaigns” page.

Two new campaigns –

UK: First employer lock-out in over 50 years – new campaign launched yesterday at the request of Britain’s largest union, Unite, and UNI Global Union.

Global: Tell the IOC to Get Rio Tinto Off the Podium! – launched ten days ago, already over 5,000 messages sent. The first global campaign ever launched while I was on holiday — well done to Derek, Andy and the others who worked on this.

Four closed campaigns –

Netherlands: Support striking cleaners – closed today with a near-record 10,984 supporters and a clear victory. This will be spelled out in a message to our lists today.

Peru: Stop union-busting, reinstate sacked union leaders – closed with over 6,000 messages sent, at the request of the Solidarity Center.

Serbia: Free jailed Kosovar union leader Hasan Abazi – closed after just 17 days with more than 7,500 messages sent. Hasan was released on bail and returned home.

Canada: End the lockout at Acadian Coach Lines – closed at the request of the union which reported that negotiations begin in a few days. Over 6,700 messages sent.

Two campaigns closing soon —

Bahrain: Free jailed trade union leader Mahdi ‘Issa Mahdi Abu Dheeb – will close tomorrow unless I hear otherwise from the Education International. Over 8,300 messages sent in the last 3 months.

Greece: Trade union leaders arrested following protests – will close soon as the campaign has been running far too long; have asked TUC and ITUC and waiting to hear from the Greek comrades. Over 9,900 messages sent.

Check out the page – I’ll indicate there what we’ve done, how much we’ve raised, and so on.