Two of the recent campaigns we’ve run on the LabourStart website are what one might consider success stories. And yet the results — so far — could not be more different.
One of the campaigns — in support of workers in the Bahamas who lost their jobs — resulted in a big victory. The other — in support of imprisoned trade union leaders in Eritrea — has produced no concrete results; the union leaders are still in prison. And yet both campaigns, the Bahamas one and the Eritrean one, have been successful. In some senses, the second one — even though the union leaders are still in jail — may be even more of a success story than the first.

Let me explain what I mean.
In late February 2005, we reported that an unscrupulous company had shut down the Royal Oasis Golf Resort and Casino in the Bahamas, leading to the loss of 1,200 jobs. The government allowed the employer to get away with paying nothing to the workers — no severance pay, no back pay and no accrued benefits. This a violation of the country’s laws and it looked like the resort owner was going to get away with it. The families of the 1,200 workers were facing extreme hardship. Their union, the Bahamas Gaming & Allied Workers Union, asked for a world-wide online campaign to be launched to compel the employer to pay what it owed the workers.
Over the course of some twelve weeks, we ran a campaign which was (to be honest) not the most successful we’d ever run, in terms of the number of messages sent. Fewer than 1,000 messages were sent. But the pressure worked, and as the union president Dennis Britton wrote to us, “The Government of the Bahamas finally made good on their promise to pay to the displaced workers their entitlements under the law. Hundreds of displaced workers converged on the auditorium of Christ the King Parish to receive their long awaited redundancy packages.”
Britton was delighted at the help we were able to provide, and wrote: “I thank all of you for your untiring support of the Gaming Union and the Workers of the Royal Oasis. Without LabourStart and your support I do not think we would has succeeded.”
That’s a classic campaign victory, even if the workers did not receive exactly what they were looking for. It was a victory for them and a victory for the international labour movement which rallied around them.
But that’s only one kind of success in online campaigning. There’s another way of measuring success too.
In mid-May 2005, we were informed by the Geneva-based International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Associations (IUF) of some bad news coming from Eritrea. It turned out that three trade union leaders had been arrested.
Tewelde Ghebremedhin, chairperson of the IUF-affiliated Food, Beverages, Hotels, Tourism, Agriculture and Tobacco Workers Federation and Minase Andezion, secretary of the textile and leather workers’ federation, were arrested by security police on March 30. They had been held in a secret security prison in the country’s capital, Asmara, for some six weeks before the campaign was launched. Meanwhile, another union leader, Habtom Weldemicael, who heads the Coca-Cola Workers Union and is a member of the food and beverage workers’ federation executive, was also jailed. Their arrests were part of a pattern of human rights violations by the Eritrean regime which had been condemned by Amnesty International and other groups.
This confronted us with a difficult challenge. To be honest, most trade unionists around the world know little or nothing about Eritrea. Until a moment ago, did you know that the name of the country’s capital was Asmara?
Our experience in the past with this sort of thing was not good. Back in August 2002, we did a campaign in support of independent trade unions in Belarus. The country’s dictator, Lukashenko, was about to destroy the last remnants of free trade unionism in the country and we needed to quickly mobilize international solidarity with a brief campaign. It was a flop; only 383 messages were sent to Minsk. Free trade unionism was snuffed out in that European country with barely a whisper of protest from the rest of the world. I often tell that story as an example of what happens when you try to do an international solidarity campaign around a country trade unionists tend to know little or nothing about.
What would happen with those Eritrean trade unionists? Would trade unionists in places like Australia and Canada and the US rally to their defense? I didn’t have high expectations.
And yet the immediate response was overwhelming. Within 14 hours, the first 1,000 messages had reached us. They were automatically passed on to two Eritrean government ministries which had identifiable email addresses. Later on we began forwarding messages to Eritrean embassies by fax, bombarding the embassies in Canberra, London, Oslo, Pretoria and Washington. I suddenly received a phone call from a man who would not identify himself, but said he was calling from Norway and that I was sending him too many faxes. I asked if he was calling from the Eritrean embassy there, and he said no — but insisted that I had sent him ten faxes and that I must stop at once. He then hung up the phone. I checked and saw that the number he phoned from was the Eritrean Embassy in Oslo. Naturally, we resumed sending off the faxes to even more embassies.
The campaign was quickly picked up and spread by others. The Campaign for Labor Rights, based in Washington, sent it off to their list. The Stop Killer Coke campaign made it an urgent alert to their thousands of activists. And of course the IUF and its affiliate unions were working hard to send off as many messages as possible.
One activist whose campaign got involved wrote to tell me that one couldn’t miss the “buzz” on the Internet around the Eritrean trade union leaders who had been jailed.
After a week or so, the Eritrean campaign had become the largest ever waged by LabourStart. It broke the 4,500 mark and continued picking up more and more supporters.
And for many of those people, it was their first contact with a LabourStart campaign. They added themselves to LabourStart’s mailing list, now growing at a rate of more than 1,000 new subscribers per week. By late May, that mailing list had shot up to 26,000 addresses, and was still growing quickly.
Meanwhile, the Eritrean union leaders continued to languish in prison.
The campaign is not yet over, of course, and will not end until Ghebremedhin, Andezion and Weldemicael are freed from jail, allowed to return home to their families and to resume their trade union work.
But even now, we can consider this campaign a success. I’ll explain why.
By involving so many thousands of people in the campaign, in many cases for the first time, and by getting so many of them onto our mailing list, we are expanding the campaigning capacity of the international trade union movement.
This means that the next time we have to do a campaign, we will be able to instantly involve much larger numbers of people than ever before.
That is at the core of what we are doing. We are building something utterly new in the trade union movement: the capacity to react rapidly to violations of workers rights anywhere in the world, and to deliver thousands of messages of protest and solidarity within hours.
We are not there yet. I look forward to the day when the arrest of a union activist anywhere in the world will trigger such a public outcry that governments and companies won’t even dare to do it. And before that, I hope to see us able to deliver not 1,000 messages in the first day, but 10,000 messages. I want the public relations departments of corporations in New York and in London to feel what embassy officials in Oslo and Canberra are feeling right now. I want us to be able to do what Amnesty International has long been doing for those it defines as “prisoners of conscience”. I want us to be able to do this for workers who have been cheated of their severance pay, or whose employers refuse to bargain with their union. I want to us to be able to do this for workers who have been jailed, but whose only crime was to try to organize a union.
The success of the Eritrea campaign is that it makes that day come sooner.
So when I look back at the victory in the Bahamas, I’m happy that we were able to help out. This is not the first time that our campaigns have worked when focused on hotels and other parts of the tourism industry. Those companies and governments hate the bad publicity. They are more vulnerable, perhaps, to this kind of pressure than the dictators in Minsk and Asmara. And our victory in the Bahamas will encourage even more people to send off messages in support of Ghebremedhin, Andezion and Weldemicael. Every time we are able to announce a victory, people are eager to help bring on the next one. Each campaign, the big ones and the small ones, the ones that result in clear victories and the ones that drag on, each one reinforces the others, and the mailing list grows and grows.
Looking at the Bahamas campaign and the Eritrea one, it gives me hope that the Internet is really proving to be the tool that I hoped it would become. Many people are excited about the net because it makes their shopping more convenient, or allows them to discover long-lost friends. That’s nice. But for me, what really matters is that the Internet is allowing us to do what unions were designed for: to build international solidarity, and to unite workers across borders. And it’s allowing us to do this one campaign at a time.