For more than a decade, LabourStart has provided online news for trade unionists. This summer the website underwent a major overhaul most of which was not visible to the casual visitor. But the changes have allowed British trade unionists to see things they could never see before.

A visit to http://www.labourstart.org/uk/ reveals a number of changes which we think you’ll find useful.
First of all, many of the news stories previously labelled as being from the “UK” are now also labelled if they are from England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
If you click on any of those terms (which are highlighted in green), you’re taken to a news page featuring news only from that region.
Second, on the main UK news page, where previously you were shown the most recent 100 news stories and had to use the search box to find any others, you can now click on a “more” button on the bottom of each page and scroll through.
This is useful because LabourStart features on average 100 UK trade union news stories every week.
Those news stories are collected from all over the web — from trade union websites, the BBC, and newspaper sites, including many local newspapers. Those doing the collecting are LabourStart’s volunteer correspondents. Over 140 of them have posted 31,000 UK union news stories in the last several years to our database. All 31,000 of those stories remain accessible — making this an invaluable tool for researchers.
Some people may not realise this, but you don’t need to visit the LabourStart website to see the latest UK labour news stories we’re linking to. Our syndication tool allows any union website to freely use the stories — it’s a simple copy and paste to do this. One hundred and twenty UK trade union websites use LabourStart’s newswire today.
You and your union can be more involved. You can signup to become a volunteer correspondent and make sure we cover your union’s news. And you can learn more about how to put a live union news feed on your website. Visit our front page at http://www.labourstart.org