May Day 2010: A special appeal from LabourStart

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.labourstart.org/docs/en/000002.html

In the next few days, trade unionists around the world will celebate May Day -- the international workers' holiday.

Many of you will celebrate at parades and picnics, or just by taking the day off.

But some workers will spend May Day on the picket lines, or camped out in front of closed factories, or even in prison.

I'm thinking of the Alta Mode garment workers in the Philippines, locked out by their employer. Or jailed Turkish trade unionist Seher Tümer. Or the Cananea miners in Mexico, on strike for nearly three years.

Those workers and many more like them should be in our thoughts this May Day.

They depend on the international trade union movement -- on us -- and we cannot fail them.

For more than twelve years, LabourStart has organized cutting-edge Internet based campaigns in support of these and many more workers.

We provide those campaigns free of charge to unions that ask for them.

Sometimes, we have helped contribute to real victories. Lives have changed because of our campaigns.

And we're doing more every day.

* We've pioneered Twitter based campaigns using new social networking tools to shame companies and get results.
* Our campaigns are now running for the first time in Chinese. (As well as a dozen other languages.)
* We've launched a social networking site for trade unionists (UnionBook). Five thousand trade unionists are already using it.
* We've run successful Labour Video of the Year and Labour Photo of the Year competitions.
* Our news database includes over 20,000 stories from 2010 alone -- in 24 languages.
* And we're holding our first ever global solidarity conference in Canada this summer.

All this costs money.

We need your support and the support of your unions.

We need your individual donations and we also need your unions -- both local and national -- to come through with substantial donations.

If you've never donated to LabourStart before, please do so today: http://www.labourstart.org/docs/en/000002.html

If you have donated, thanks -- but we need your help again.

If every single one of you were to donate the equivalent of just fifteen US dollars, we'd have the resources we need to do even more than we do now.

Of course that's not going to happen -- we don't expect every person reading this message to make a donation of $15.00. (Though we wish that were the case.)

Which means that we need each of you to dig deep and to persuade your union to dig deep to make the largest donation you can afford.

The striking workers in Cananea, Mexico are counting on us. The locked out workers at Alta Mode in the Philippines are counting on us. Seher Tümer in Turkey is counting on us.

Please don't let them down. Please donate today: http://www.labourstart.org/docs/en/000002.html

Thank you very much.

Eric Lee.