LabourStart

"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 700 trade union websites around the world. News is collected by a network of over 500 volunteer correspondents and appears in 20 languages, including English, Spanish, Esperanto, French, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish Turkish, Indonesian, Polish, Creole, Finnish, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Greek and Persian.

In addition to the news, LabourStart now features a 24/7 Internet radio station (Radio LabourStart), a collection of online videos (LabourStart TV), a photo of the day, discussion forums, and a jobs board for people seeking employment in the trade union movement. A recent feature has been the development of a Health and Safety NewsWire run jointly with Hazards.

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 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 list, 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. The mailing list is 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.

External links

* [http://www.labourstart.org LabourStart Website]
* [http://www.labourstart.org/lnw.shtml LabourStart News Syndication Service]
* [http://radio.labourstart.org Radio LabourStart]
* [http://www.labourstart.tv LabourStart TV]
* [http://www.labourstartjobs.org LabourStart Jobs]
* [http://www.labourstart.org/actnow.shtml Global online campaigns]