LabourStart
Encyclopedia
LabourStart is the online news service of the international trade union
movement. Founded in March 1998, it distributes news both from its own website and also through a news syndication service (in both RSS and JavaScript formats) which is used by over 730 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
.
News links are collected by a network of over 900 volunteer correspondents and appear in 27 languages: English
, Spanish
, Esperanto
, French
, Italian
, Danish
, Dutch
, Norwegian
, Portuguese
, Finnish
, Swedish
Turkish
, Indonesian
, Polish
, Finnish
, Chinese
, Russian
, Arabic
, Greek
, Georgian
, Hebrew
, Czech
, Serbian
, Tamil
, Bulgarian
, Creole
, and Persian
.
In addition to the news, LabourStart features a collection of online labour news videos (LabourStart TV), a photo of the week, and annual competitions for the labour photo and video of the year.
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.
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 essentially 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, run the project on a day by day basis.
Central to LabourStart's efforts is its 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 November 2011, there were over 80,000 names on the list. The mailing lists are used by LabourStart primarily to promote its online campaigns in support of workers' rights around the world.
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. The latest LabourStart online campaigns call on the Egyptian government to enact a labour law and on the government of Georgia to stop union-busting and strike-breaking. Both campaigns are initiatives of the International Trade Union Confederation
with which LabourStart has an ongoing partnership in promoting workers' rights through online campaigns.
In October 2011 a LabourStart campaign in support of striking Suzuki
workers in India collected over 7,000 supporters in less than four days and led to the company and union coming back to the negotiating table and an end to a bitter strike. It was one of the five largest campaigns LabourStart ever ran.
This was followed by a very short campaign to secure the release of two jailed Fijian trade unionists. Following the sending of 4,000 protest email messages, both were released within 24 hours.
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 and in Istanbul in 2011. The next conferences are planned for Sydney, Australia (2012) and Berlin, Germany (2014).
In 2010 LabourStart launched UnionBook, a social network for trade unionists. It runs on the Ning (website) platform.
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
movement. Founded in March 1998, it distributes news both from its own website and also through a news syndication service (in both RSS and JavaScript formats) which is used by over 730 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
Hazards
Hazards is the only independent, union-friendly magazine to win major international awards. A recurring theme in the magazine is that workplace unions are the best hope for better, safer work - and Hazards says it provides the information and resources to make the union job easier. Hazards looks...
.
News links are collected by a network of over 900 volunteer correspondents and appear in 27 languages: English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Esperanto
Esperanto
is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto , the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Danish
Danish language
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...
, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
, Indonesian
Indonesian language
Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....
, Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, Georgian
Georgian language
Georgian is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.Georgian is the primary language of about 4 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad...
, Hebrew
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
, Czech
Czech language
Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...
, Serbian
Serbian language
Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....
, Tamil
Tamil language
Tamil is a Dravidian language spoken predominantly by Tamil people of the Indian subcontinent. It has official status in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the Indian union territory of Pondicherry. Tamil is also an official language of Sri Lanka and Singapore...
, Bulgarian
Bulgarian language
Bulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian, along with the closely related Macedonian language, demonstrates several linguistic characteristics that set it apart from all other Slavic languages such as the elimination of case declension, the...
, Creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
, and Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
.
In addition to the news, LabourStart features a collection of online labour news videos (LabourStart TV), a photo of the week, and annual competitions for the labour photo and video of the year.
LabourStart was founded in March 1998 as part of the website launched in 1996 by Eric Lee
Eric Lee (labour organizer)
Eric Lee is an American-born trade unionist, writer, and web site developer. He is the founding editor of LabourStart, an online news service for the trade union movemement...
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
Canadian Union of Public Employees
The Canadian Union of Public Employees is a Canadian trade union serving the public sector - although it has in recent years organized workplaces in the non-profit and para-public sector as well...
(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.
From 1998 through 2002, LabourStart was a project of Labour and Society International
Labour and Society International
Labour and Society International was a non-governmental organisation launched in Britain in the 1990s. Its founders were Arthur Lipow and David Clement. It ceased functioning in 2002-3, and its last director was Stirling Smith...
(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 essentially 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, run the project on a day by day basis.
Central to LabourStart's efforts is its 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 November 2011, there were over 80,000 names on the list. The mailing lists are used by LabourStart primarily to promote its online campaigns in support of workers' rights around the world.
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. The latest LabourStart online campaigns call on the Egyptian government to enact a labour law and on the government of Georgia to stop union-busting and strike-breaking. Both campaigns are initiatives of the International Trade Union Confederation
International Trade Union Confederation
The International Trade Union Confederation is the world's largest trade union federation. It was formed on November 1, 2006 out of the merger of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labour...
with which LabourStart has an ongoing partnership in promoting workers' rights through online campaigns.
In October 2011 a LabourStart campaign in support of striking Suzuki
Suzuki
is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Hamamatsu, Japan that specializes in manufacturing compact automobiles and 4x4 vehicles, a full range of motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles , outboard marine engines, wheelchairs and a variety of other small internal combustion engines...
workers in India collected over 7,000 supporters in less than four days and led to the company and union coming back to the negotiating table and an end to a bitter strike. It was one of the five largest campaigns LabourStart ever ran.
This was followed by a very short campaign to secure the release of two jailed Fijian trade unionists. Following the sending of 4,000 protest email messages, both were released within 24 hours.
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 and in Istanbul in 2011. The next conferences are planned for Sydney, Australia (2012) and Berlin, Germany (2014).
In 2010 LabourStart launched UnionBook, a social network for trade unionists. It runs on the Ning (website) platform.