August 24, 2021

“Working Class History” Is Preparing to Launch a Labor Rights App. Crowdfunding Is on Pace to Get It Done.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

For the past seven years, Working Class History has been a Twitter feed, podcast, website, and gallery of images and information in labor rights across the world. It’s a trove of multilingual milestones in collective organizing and worker action, mining the archives and not-so-public records. And the project is growing fast. The team at WCH is crowdfunding to launch an app.

The place to start, if you’re new to @wrkclasshistory, is “On This Day,” a series that in the past few days has commemorated one of the most iconic strikes of the 1970s, when a workforce of predominantly South Asian and East African Asian women in London banded together and walked off the job for nearly two years, and marked the 97th birthday yesterday of Madeleine Riffaud. The French resistance fighter, at 20 years old, in 1944, overtook a Nazi supply train with three other resistance fighters. She also wrote poetry and became a journalist, and Picasso drew her portrait for her poetry collection. Here’s an inspiring interview with Riffaud when she was 92 years old; hat tip to historian Anne Sebba.

Working Class History’s English-language campaign is here; in Arabic (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter), Farsi (Twitter, Instagram, Telegram), French (Instagram, Facebook), Norwegian (Facebook), Portuguese (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), Romanian (Facebook), Spanish (Instagram, Facebook), Swedish (Facebook). Coming up: Hindi, Italian, Irish, German, Turkish, and several other languages.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate