Online Activists Gather From Around Globe to Jumpstart
Labor Movement
More than 200 people from 28 countries attend
LabourStart's first public conference
By Stuart Elliott
Tuesday, July 13, 6:35 pm
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6224/online_activists_gather_from_around_globe_to_jumpstart_labor_movement/

Sometimes it's hard to understand the importance of an
event or an organization when you're involved in it. As
a volunteer correspondent for LabourStart.org and a
participant in its "Act Now"  campaigns, I obviously
think LabourStart an important project. But I really
didn't really comprehend its potential until I attended
the first public LabourStart conference at McMaster
University's School of Labour Studies in Hamilton,
Ontario.

"As unions confront a 21st century global capitalism,
which is imposing a race to the bottom to union-free
environments, unions must use new technologies to create
a new labor internationalism," said Eric Lee, founding
editor of Labour Start. "The mission of LabourStart is
to promote those technologies and to practice a
consistent internationalism."  

LabourStart is an international labor news and
campaigning site, run on a shoestring and powered by
nearly 800 volunteer correspondents. Every day  the site
publishes links to labor news in 23 different languages,
and its news feeds appear on more than 800 union
websites. It conducts e-mail campaigns in eight
different languages. 

There was some trepidation among LabourStart leaders
about whether an Internet-based, low budget union news
and campaigning site could attract an audience of union
activists oustide its most committed corespondents.
Particularly since, unlike the recently concluded ICTU
conference, this was not a delegated meeting.
But the conference was able to attract over 200
participants from more than 28 countries. Attendees
ranged from presidents of national unions, to
representatives of Global Union Federations, to local
union officers, to staffers, to grassroots activists.

Adam Lee of United Steelworkers International thanked
LabourStart for its "tremendously effective" campaign on
behalf of Vale nickel miners strikers, who settled a
year-long strike just days before the conference began.
On the first morning of the strike, which began in July
2009, more than 1,000 emails were sent to the
Brazil-based multinational company. Two-thirds were from
outside Canada, in eight languages from 80 countries,
Lee said, It provided a "real boost" to the workers. And
Brazilian workers for Vale were able to win a better
than expected contract because the company didn't want
to take on two international campaigns at the same time.

Robin Alexander, director of international affairs for
the United Electrical workers union, said that when she
got an appeal from workers at PEMEX, Mexico's
state-owned petroleum company, the first place she
turned for help was LabourStart.

As Lennon Ying-Dah Wong, a union leader from Taiwan,
spoke on a panel about China, I loooked to my left and
saw Benedicto Martinez Orozco, co-president of the
Frente Autentico del Trabajo. Michael Eisenscher of US
Labor Against the War, Amjad Ali of the General Union of
Oil Employees in Basra (Iraq), and Erin Radford of the
AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center spoke on a panel about
unions in Iraq. Other panels were devoted to Mexico,
Eastern Europe, and Iran.  

Unfortunately, some people were unable to attend the
conference--but the reasons why are enlightening. A
leader of Bangladeshi textile workers union canceled his
visit because of a monumental campaign in his home
country--more than 50,000 workers there are on strike,
protesting the lowest wages in the textile industry.

Representatives of independent unions in Egypt and
Algeria were, at the last moment, denied visas by
Canada. (AFL-CIO Solidarity Center representatives  ably
filled in at a workshop on the revival of unions in
those countries.) The ham-handness of Canadian
authorities may backire. Derek Blackadder, national
representative for the Canadian Union of Public
Employees, said that there was so much outrage at the
exclusion of the Egyptian and Algerian unionists and so
much excitement about their pioneering work that
Canadian unionists will be exploring ongoing solidarity
work on their behalf.

Of course, connecting disparate unionists, spread across
different levels of different unions, to unite in
international solidarity is no easy task. But
LabourStart's global network of 800 correspondents and
70,000 Act Now e-mail activists will continue to be a
part of that effort, which must be a central component
of the future of the labor movement.

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