LabourStart

Last updated

LabourStart is the news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement.[ citation needed ] It distributes news both via its own website and also through a news syndication service (in both RSS and JavaScript formats) which is used by trade union websites around the world. There are newswires for specific languages, countries, regions, and some US states and every Canadian province. There are special newswires for online campaigns, women's labour news, and even a Health and Safety NewsWire run jointly with Hazards. The site has 638,000 unique visits per month as of February 2012.

Contents

News links are collected by a network of nearly 960 volunteer correspondents and appear in 27 languages.

History

LabourStart's logo, since 1998. LabourStart logo.gif
LabourStart's logo, since 1998.

LabourStart was founded in March 1998 as part of the website launched in 1996 by Eric Lee in order to provide updates to his book, The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism. The LabourStart website was initially hosted by Solinet, the website of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) and its editor was based in Israel, on Kibbutz Ein Dor. In June 1998, Lee moved to London and the site has been based in Britain ever since.[ citation needed ]

From 1998 through 2002, LabourStart was a project of Labour and Society International (LSI), a non-governmental organisation based in London and initially headed up by Arthur Lipow, Stirling Smith and David Clement. At the end of 2002, LSI ceased functioning and LabourStart became entirely independent. At the same time, a number of LabourStart correspondents met up for the first time in London and have continued to meet online ever since. A number of correspondents have been named as Senior Correspondents and they, together with founding editor Lee, ran the project on a day by day basis until a recent re-organization.[ citation needed ]

In 2001 LabourStart expanded its news service to include news in other languages.[ citation needed ]

Governance

2023 LabourStart Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi, Georgia. 2023 LabourStart Solidarity Conference, Tbilisi, Georgia 27.jpg
2023 LabourStart Solidarity Conference in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Until September 2015 LabourStart was administered informally by a self-selected group of Senior Correspondents. Generally these were people active in the labour movements of their home countries. The selection criteria were never formalized but most were full-time trade union officials, either appointed or elected. Efforts were made to select Senior Correspondents in order to expand LabourStart's footprint in various countries but these were mostly unsuccessful. Readership and campaigns participation remained largely confined to Europe, North America and Australia.[ citation needed ]

In order to address this ongoing problem and other structural issues an invitation-only retreat was held in September 2015 in Brussels. The retreat was meant to respond to complaints about a lack of transparency in regard to LabourStart's operations and finances, the chaotic nature of decision-making, the need to become a truly global organization, and the need for succession planning as many of the organization's volunteers, including its founder, are now in their late 50s or 60s.[ citation needed ]

The retreat resulted in the creation of an Executive Committee with formal decision-making authority and a number of issue-specific working groups. Steps were also taken to move toward equal gender representation within LabourStart's leadship but women remain in a minority.[ citation needed ]

Campaign Work

Central to LabourStart's efforts are its multilingual mailing lists, which started with around 500 names in 1998 and within four years had grown more than sixfold to 3,227 names. Five years later, it had grown even more, and by June 2007 there were more than 53,000 subscribers to the weekly newsletter. By April 2012, there were just under 100,000 names on the lists. The mailing lists are used by LabourStart primarily to promote its online campaigns in support of workers' rights around the world.[ citation needed ]

As of November 2015 the various mailing lists are as follows:

Social networks also play a role in LabourStart's news distribution and campaigning services. It has focussed its efforts on Facebook and Twitter and has a larger following than many national trade union centres.[ citation needed ]

Twitter followers:

Facebook Pages and Groups:

In recent years, LabourStart has conducted dozens of global online campaigns on behalf of unions. These campaigns have led in many cases to companies and governments being compelled to release jailed trade unionists, to negotiate with unions, and so on. Examples of recent LabourStart online campaigns call on the Egyptian government to overturn the jail sentence for Kamal Abbas and on the government of Iran to not execute jailed trade unionist and university teacher Abdolreza Ghanbari. These campaigns are initiatives of the International Trade Union Confederation and the Education International with which LabourStart has an ongoing partnership in promoting workers' rights through online campaigns.[ citation needed ]

LabourStart campaigns are sponsored or endorsed by a trade union or global union federation. LabourStart's campaign services are provided to unions at no charge.[ citation needed ]

It is not unknown for an online action mounted by LabourStart to exceed 20,000 participants within a week but the norm is around 10,000. Nation-specific campaigns may see as little as a few hundred participants or as many as 10,000, depending in part on the issue and on the population of the relevant country (Canada and the United Kingdom are the two most common single-country campaign sources).[ citation needed ]

Global Solidarity Conferences

LabourStart holds annual Global Solidarity Conferences. Following small international meetings in London and Washington DC in 2008 and 2009, major events were held in Hamilton, Ontario in 2010, [1] Istanbul in 2011, Sydney, Australia (2012), Berlin, Germany (2014) and Toronto, Canada (2016).[ citation needed ]

UnionBook

In 2010 LabourStart launched UnionBook, a social network for trade unionists. It runs on the Ning platform. By March 2012 it had just over 5,000 members. By 2015 membership in UnionBook had stabilized at just over 6,000 and the site had become a forum for a small number of users with extreme or repetitive views. At a meeting of the LabourStart Executive Committee in Brussels in September 2015 the decision was made to offer the site as-is to any interested union or group of trade unionists. As of October 2015 references to LabourStart as the 'owner' of UnionBook were removed from the site. As of January 2016 there had been no offers to assume responsibility for the site and it appears likely that it will simply be shut down.[ citation needed ]

Educational Activities

LabourStart volunteers regularly conduct workshops on the organizing potential of the new media for unions. These workshops are often organized at the request of a specific union or central labour body but LabourStart volunteers also often play key roles in organizing union-tech events such as the LabourTech conferences in Canada.[ citation needed ] It has also provided hands-on technical assistance to unions moving onto the 'net but the demand for this service has declined rapidly since most unions of any size are now well-established online.[ citation needed ] One of the first evaluations of the then-new Facebook for trade union organizing purposes was conducted by a team of LabourStart volunteers based in Canada and the UK in 2007, well before Facebook was widely known or popular outside university student circles.[ citation needed ]

Controversies

LabourStart has been criticized by some in the digital labour movement including Walton Pantland of Cyberunions for continuing to rely on e-mail as the 'killer app' for online campaigning into the foreseeable future. These critics tend to see the e-mail-based tactics used by LabourStart as dated and not reflective of the move to smartphones as the primary devices for accessing the internet by trade unionists, especially in the global south. In response LabourStart has relied on its analyses of the weaknesses of alternative platforms, in particular the question of who owns or controls those alternative platforms .

As all of LabourStart global and national leadership figures are active within global, national or local trade unions they often take positions publicly. These are then sometimes attributed to LabourStart. Attempts are made by LabourStart to explain that it acts at the request of the existing structures of the global labour movement and that its volunteers are not subject to organizational discipline . But attacks on LabourStart, including calls for boycotts of the site and its campaigns [ permanent dead link ], resulting from a position taken by one of its high-profile volunteers are regular if not frequent occurrences.

Similarly, disputes within and amongst LabourStart volunteers that reflect the differing positions of the unions and political factions from which they are drawn are regular occurrences. The Canadian and Dutch sections have, for example, clashed over whether a confessional trade union, one that is explicitly affiliated with an organized religion or church, can be considered a legitimate trade union. Issues like these are fundamental to what LabourStart does as the question of legitimacy determines whether a trade union is able to access LabourStart's services and whether persons affiliated with it may move into senior leadership positions within LabourStart.[ citation needed ]

LabourStart is regularly subject to criticism for its lack of a footprint in Latin America, large parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa.[ citation needed ]

Reception

Other labour organisations and news sources treat LabourStart as a known and serious campaigning organisation. Thus ITFGlobal has "LabourStart appeal backs Estonian activist sacked for speaking out"; Solidarity Center has "LabourStart Campaign. Peruvian Union Leader Fired after Speaking out against Poor Working Conditions"; Workers' Liberty has "Forging global solidarity", a report on LabourStart's 2014 Berlin conference; similarly Red Pepper has "Labourstart Global Solidarity Conference opens this Friday in Berlin". The Labor Hall of Fame reports on a series of LabourStart activities. Trades Unions across the world likewise rely on LabourStart services and report on LabourStart campaigns, thus European Federation of Public Service Unions reports on "Labourstart campaign to support sacked workers Istanbul Hospital - please sign". The Canadian GoUnion has a "partners and allies" page about LabourStart with a history of the organisation. Industri all reports on LabourStart's campaign at Rio Tinto. Justice for Colombia has "LabourStart Launches Colombia Petition".

LabourStart received the prestigious Arthur Svensson International Prize for Trade Union Rights in 2016. [2]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Confederation of Free Trade Unions</span> International trade union federation

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) was an international trade union. It came into being on 7 December 1949 following a split within the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), and was dissolved on 31 October 2006 when it merged with the World Confederation of Labour (WCL) to form the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC).

<i>Morning Star</i> (British newspaper) British daily tabloid format newspaper

The Morning Star is a left-wing British daily newspaper with a focus on social, political and trade union issues. Originally founded in 1930 as the Daily Worker by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ownership was transferred from the CPGB to an independent readers' co-operative, the People's Press Printing Society, in 1945 and later renamed the Morning Star in 1966. The paper describes its editorial stance as in line with Britain's Road to Socialism, the programme of the Communist Party of Britain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">World Confederation of Labour</span> International labour organization

The World Confederation of Labour (WCL) was an international labour organization founded in 1920 and based in Europe. Fascist governments of the 1930s repressed the federation and imprisoned many of its leaders, limiting operations until the end of World War II. In 2006 it became part of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), ending its existence as an independent organization.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rodney Bickerstaffe</span> British trade unionist

Rodney Kevan Bickerstaffe was a British trade unionist. He was General Secretary of the National Union of Public Employees (1982–1993) and UNISON (1996–2001), Britain's largest trade union at the time. He later became president of the UK National Pensioners Convention (2001–2005).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canadian Union of Postal Workers</span> Trade union

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers is a public-sector trade union representing postal workers including letter carriers, rural and suburban mail carriers, postal clerks, mail handlers and dispatchers, technicians, mechanics and electricians employed at Canada Post as well as private sector workers outside Canada Post. Currently comprising upwards of 50,000 members, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers has historically been labeled as militant because of some of the actions undertaken since its inception in 1965 to help guarantee rights to all postal workers. According to former president Jean-Claude Parrot, "We succeeded to get the support of the membership because we earned our credibility with them...we got that reputation [of militancy] because we earned it."

Mick Rix is a British trade unionist and politician.

The Liverpool Dockers' dispute between dockers and their employers, Mersey Docks and Harbour Company (MDHC) and Torside Ltd, in Liverpool, England, lasted from 1995 to 1998. Although considered a strike, it was strictly a lockout as the employers, Mersey Docks, sacked the dockers for breach of contract when they refused to cross a picket line set up by their sacked Torside Limited colleagues. Initially, five Torside workers were dismissed following a dispute regarding overtime pay, who in turn formed a picket line that other dockers refused to cross in solidarity.

The General Federation of Workers Trade Unions in Bahrain(Formerly known as the General Committee for Bahrain Workers) (GFWTUB) is a national trade union federation in Bahrain. It was established in 2002, by the Workers Trade Union Law granting workers the right to organize collectively.

The Campaign For A New Workers' Party was an initiative of the Socialist Party of England and Wales that argued for the establishment of a new mass workers' party, involving trade union activists, socialists, anti-capitalists, anti-war and environmental activists. It was launched at the party's annual Socialism event in November 2005. There were more than 4,000 signatories to the campaign's founding declaration, many of whom were trade unionists. Some left parties claimed that the CNWP was a front for the Socialist Party.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kilusang Mayo Uno</span> Leftist labor union in the Philippines

Kilusang Mayo Uno, also known by its initials KMU is an independent labor center in the Philippines. It promotes "genuine, militant and patriotic trade unionism". The KMU was established on May 1, 1980 to fill a clear need for a workers' organization that would stand for workers' rights and against foreign domination.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance</span> Public sector trade union

The Northern Ireland Public Service Alliance (NIPSA) is a trade union in Northern Ireland affiliated to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. It is the largest trade union in Northern Ireland, with around 46,000 members, and is organised into two groups, the Civil Service Group, for the staff of public bodies employed on civil service terms and conditions, and the Public Officers Group, for employees of education and library boards, health and social services boards, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, district councils, other public bodies and voluntary organisations.

Korean Progressive Network Center, also known as Jinbonet, is a web services organization in Seoul, South Korea. It was founded in 1998. Jinbonet is a network that provides ICT services to that country's progressive movement, civil society and workers unions.

Marc Bélanger is a labour union educator specializing in information technology and distance education via computer communications. He worked for the Workers' Activities Programme of the training centre of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Turin, Italy, from 2000-2008. He was head of the Programme from 2007-2008. The Programme operates the largest international union education school in the world. Its objective is to help build the capacities of unions in developing countries. The ILO is a specialized agency of the United Nations.

The Global Labour University (GLU) is an international network of universities, trade unions, NGOs and the International Labour Organisation. It was initiated in 2002 and offers master's programs, academic certificate programs and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on sustainable development, social justice, international labour standards and trade/labour unions, economic policies and global institutions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Australia Asia Worker Links</span>

Australia Asia Worker Links (AAWL) is an Australian non-government organisation active since 1979, established to forge international labour movement links in the Asia-Pacific region. Its office is in the Victorian Trades Hall Council building in Melbourne, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trades Union Congress</span> Trade union centre in England and Wales

The Trades Union Congress (TUC) is a national trade union centre, a federation of trade unions that collectively represent most unionised workers in England and Wales. There are 48 affiliated unions with a total of about 5.5 million members. Paul Nowak is the TUC's current General Secretary, serving from January 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Lavalette</span> British activist

Michael Lavalette is a British academic specialising in social work. He was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1981 until 2018, when he left to join Counterfire. He was a local councillor in Preston, Lancashire from 2003 to 2014.

Left Unity is a left-wing political party in the United Kingdom founded in 2013 when film director and social campaigner Ken Loach appealed for a new party to replace the Labour Party. More than 10,000 people supported Loach's appeal.

The Alliance for Workers' Liberty (AWL), also known as Workers' Liberty, is a Trotskyist group in Britain and Australia, which has been identified with the theorist Sean Matgamna throughout its history. It publishes the newspaper Solidarity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Burnett (trade unionist)</span>

John Burnett was an English trade unionist.

References

  1. Elliott, Stuart (1 April 2010). "Ten Things We Liked About the Labor Movement in 2010". Democratic Left. Archived from the original on 14 March 2016.
  2. "Laureates".