For the last couple days since coming home from Pittsburgh I have been in attendance at the AFL-CIO-hosted LabourStart.org conference. This is a meet up of labor correspondents from around the world. As a correspondent from both the Teamsters and Union Review, it is an honor to be among this group, share a little about my work, and get to know what others are up to. My diary is a brief review of the day.
Today I had the opportunity to return to the LabourStart.org conference for the second day in Washington, DC. We covered a lot of ground, including campaigns we are active in at our unions and how we can get LabourStart more of a presence in the United States.
The conference is being held at the AFL-CIO building, which also posted about the event today, and (insert shameless plug...) mentioned me, which I think is, well, cool.
I think of LabourStart as a wire service that aggregates labor news from around the world. If you have your own site, you then feed that news. UnionReview.com has their feed in the right-hand column of the site, we feed all U.S. news that hits LabourStart.org.
Today the item that kept getting drilled in for me was that we are, in fact, an international labor movement. While Union Review focuses entirely on the movement in the United States, the fight is, of course, being carried out all over the world. This week I met folks from Geneva, Finland, Australia and India. Every single person is working for labor rights in their respective countries.
I was asked to give a brief presentation about what I am working on with the Teamsters. I decided to best illustrate the use of our online work with the Drive Up Standards / School Bus Workers United campaign. I talked about the interactivity that goes into the site with the forum, comments on the blog and videos people can both watch and post on their own.
A lot of campaign sites are not set up to actually organize right from their web platform. I explained that workers get a user name and password to comment on stories, and when they go through that process that they also leave their names and email addresses. Once we have mined these workers' names, we add them to the database for additional outreach. I have the same technology in place for Union Review and eventually want to send out newsletters from the site.
It was good to share what I am doing with the union with others from around the world. And, I look forward to having them work on broadening our messaging. If you are not familiar with LabourStart.org, you should get to know their work and contribution to the international labor movement.
That's all.