In late 1997, I had an idea. Why not sponsor a “Labour Website of the Year” competition? My book on “The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism” had come out a year earlier. There were already a number of union websites. I had a site of my own, at that time hosted by Canada’s largest union, CUPE. It had been set up to accompany the book. LabourStart did not yet exist.
I put out the word, and to my astonishment, people began voting (by email). Seven sites received votes. The winner was the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM). Now to be perfectly honest, not very many people voted. And seven is not a whole lot of sites. But it was a beginning.

A few months later, LabourStart was launched. And in early 1999, I tried to hold a second labour website of the year competition. This time, dozens of votes were cast for some 25 sites. The winner was a British union, the GPMU.
It was clear that we were on to something. The number of votes began to steadily increase, and by early 2001 we were up to 37 sites in the running and some 300 votes cast. A year later, we experienced a more than 1,000 per cent increase as the number of votes shot up to 3,022 with some 200 sites in the running. Only four years had passed since we had begun.
Last year was our most successful so far, with 6,477 votes cast for some 330 websites. The winner was one of the very best union websites, Australia’s Workers Online. It had featured as a runner-up in nearly all the previous competitions.
Today, voting began for the 7th annual Labour Website of the Year. There are 27 officially nominated sites, suggested by LabourStart’s network of more than 230 correspondents. Those sites come from trade unions all over the globe — in Australia, Malaysia, Nepal, Korea, South Africa, the USA, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands and Norway. For the first time, one of the candidates is from an Arab country — the website of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions, which came into existence following the collapse of the Saddam regime.
Also for the first time, weblogs are prominently featured among the nominated sites — the first two blogs produced by trade union general secretaries in the U.K.
Voters are not confined to the officially nominated sites. Not only can they vote for whomever they please using a ‘write-in ballot’, but any site can place a ‘Vote for this site’ banner on its home page and begin collecting votes.
Voting takes place over a three week period and will end on 31 January, with results to be announced the following day.
It may not be the Academy Awards, but it is the only global award for website excellence in the trade union movement. And that’s pretty exciting, isn’t it?