Campaign Work
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 April 2012, there were just under 100,000 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. 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.
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.
In April 2012, a LabourStart campaign demanding the release of jailed Kosovar metal workers union leader Hasan Abazi, who had been arrested in Serbia on his way to a European metal workers union event, lasted for 17 days. Nearly 8,000 messages of protest were sent to the Serbian government. On 20 April, Abazi was freed on bail and returned to Kosovo.
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.
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Famous quotes containing the words campaign and/or work:
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.”
—Mario Cuomo (b. 1932)
“In the wildest nature, there is not only the material of the most cultivated life, and a sort of anticipation of the last result, but a greater refinement already than is ever attained by man.... Nature is prepared to welcome into her scenery the finest work of human art, for she is herself an art so cunning that the artist never appears in his work.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)