What does global solidarity look like? Notes for a panel discussion

The following are my notes for a panel discussion on global solidarity at the UALE conference in New Orleans, 24 March 2011.
LabourStart’s extensive experience
We have been at this since 1998
At first, we just linked to union campaigns
By 2002, we had in place our own system – very similar to what Avaaz
and others now use
Since then we’ve run probably close to 100 campaigns at the request of unions
These campaigns are multilingual, integrate into our news, are
syndicated, and are promoted primarily through our mailing list of
70,000 — which is, in turn, built through the campaigns
We’ve had a number of successes – I will talk about only one of them at the end
What we have learned …
Key barriers/challenges:
Consciousness:
This is a problem I discussed in my book on labour and the internet
back in 1995.  There has been a century-long decline in trade union
internationalism and we have to see things in perspective.  If we
could attain the levels of internationalism achieved in the early
1900s, we’d be doing very well.  The problem is particularly acute in
the US — we find a very low level of participation in our global
campaigns in this country, with a much higher level in, for example,
Canada.  The problem is at all levels of unions.
Language:
This is a massive problem in doing international work.  There are
5,000 spoken languages in the world today.  But even the websites of
global unions and the ITUC are usually only in 3 – 5 languages.
LabourStart works in nearly 25 languages, but we’re still not there
yet.  This means a very low level of engagement with unions in
non-English speaking countries — and only with those who speak
foreign languages.  Solutions include — translation and
interpretation (we use volunteers with some success); training trade
unionists in foreign languages – especially teaching English; machine
translation; international auxiliary languages.
What works:
Building alliances:
We do a lot of work with GUFs as well as national unions, but also
with NGOs like AI, IASWI, MSN, Clean Clothes campaign, Banana Link,
etc.  This is very important to reach out and build large, robust
networks of people who care about these issues.
The new communications technology – but certain tools work better than others:
Email remains our most powerful tool, though we were learning its
limitations.  (E.g., open rates for email messages from campaigning
organizations are probably considerably lower than we think.)
Websites and social networks (in particular FB) are somewhat less
effective tools, and the over-reliance by some on FB is a problem
which we can discuss.
Measuring success:
Success is not measured by hits, page views, the number of messages
sent or even the growth of our mailing lists, even if these can be
important.
Success is what happens when we achieve the goals of a campaign —
such as forcing an employer to sit down and negotiate, or getting a
jailed trade unionist released.
Nevertheless, having said that, we are currently in the early days of
using the new technology, and building a new global network of
activists like LabourStart has done, can be measured in part by the
growth of its mailing list, the increase in the number of protest
messages sent through its ActNOW system, and so on.
End with the story of Joanne Delaney and what it teaches us about
building global solidarity.
-end-