15 Facts About LabourStart

LabourStart is the news and campaigning website of the international trade union movement.

LabourStart was founded in March 1998 as part of the website launched in 1996 by Eric Lee in order to provide updates to his book, The Labour Movement and the Internet: The New Internationalism.

The LabourStart website was initially hosted by Solinet, the website of the Canadian Union of Public Employees and its editor was based in Israel, on Kibbutz Ein Dor.

From 1998 through 2002, LabourStart was a project of Labour and Society International, a non-governmental organisation based in London and initially headed up by Arthur Lipow, Stirling Smith and David Clement.

In 2001 LabourStart expanded its news service to include news in other languages.

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Until September 2015 LabourStart was administered informally by a self-selected group of Senior Correspondents.

Central to LabourStart's efforts are its multilingual mailing lists, which started with around 500 names in 1998 and within four years had grown more than sixfold to 3,227 names.

In recent years, LabourStart has conducted dozens of global online campaigns on behalf of unions.

LabourStart campaigns are sponsored or endorsed by a trade union or global union federation.

In 2010 LabourStart launched UnionBook, a social network for trade unionists.

One of the first evaluations of the then-new Facebook for trade union organizing purposes was conducted by a team of LabourStart volunteers based in Canada and the UK in 2007, well before Facebook was widely known or popular outside university student circles.

LabourStart has been criticized by some in the digital labour movement including Walton Pantland of Cyberunions for continuing to rely on e-mail as the 'killer app' for online campaigning into the foreseeable future.

Attempts are made by LabourStart to explain that it acts at the request of the existing structures of the global labour movement and that its volunteers are not subject to organizational discipline [4].

LabourStart is regularly subject to criticism for its lack of a footprint in Latin America, large parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa outside South Africa.

LabourStart received the prestigious Arthur Svensson International Prize for Trade Union Rights in 2016.