Something about the users of our site

Unorganized Labour: We get very little direct feedback from persons looking to join the organized labour movement. This comes as no surprise to us. It has always been the case that those looking to become organized have gone about their activities discreetly. As the labour movement moves with greater speed toward organizing the unorganized, we trust that potential members do use our site to find the best representation available.

From our stats, we get the picture that our site is providing a useful service to these surfers. We can tell this indirectly by looking at how some surfers access our pages. Following the layout of our site, these users tend to locate the page containing the links of organizations in their geographic vicinity that they can join. Typically this means 5 or fewer page views in total. Then they leave us.

Organized Labour: As our links indicate, we have users from around the world. The list of countries from where we got hits is as follows:

Albania	Andorra	Antigua and Barbuda	Argentina	Armenia
Aruba	Australia	Austria	Bahamas	Barbados
Belarus	Belgium	Belize	Benin	Bermuda
Bosnia and Herzagovina	Botswana	Brazil	Brunei Darussal	Bulgaria
Burkina Faso	Cambodia	Canada	Cayman Islands	Chile
China	Christmas Island	Cocos (Keeling)	Colombia	Costa Rica
Cote D'Ivoire	Croatia	Cuba	Cyprus	Czech Republic
Denmark	Dominica	Dominican Republic	Ecuador	Egypt
Estonia	Faroe Islands	Fiji	Finland	France
French Polynesia	Gambia	Georgia	Germany	Ghana
Gibraltar	Greece	Guadeloupe	Guatemala	Guinea
Hong Kong	Hungary	Iceland	India	Indonesia
Iran	Ireland	Israel	Italy	Jamaica
Japan	Jordan	Kazakhstan	Kenya	Korea (South)
Kyrgyzstan	Latvia	Lebanon	Lithuania	Luxembourg
Macedonia	Malaysia	Malta	Mauritius	Mexico
Moldova	Morocco	Mozambique	Myanmar	Namibia
Nauru	Nepal	Netherlands	New Caledonia	New Zealand
Nicaragua	Nigeria	Niue	Norway	Oman
Pakistan	Panama	Paraguay	Peru	Philippines
Poland	Portugal	Qatar	Romania	Russian Federation
Saint Lucia	Samoa	Saudi Arabia	Singapore	Slovak Republic
Slovenia	South Africa	Spain	Sri Lanka	Sweden
Switzerland	Syria	São Tomé	Taiwan	Tanzania
Thailand	Togo	Trinidad and Tobago	Turkey	Turks and Caicos
Tuvalu	USSR (former)	Uganda	Ukraine	United Arab Emirates
United Kingdom	United States	Uruguay	Venezuela	Virgin Islands
Zimbabwe

Our email correspondence and usage stats indicate that persons already within the labour movement move more heavily through our resource pages. Further, this is the group that really keeps us up to date on labour organization links, and that's because they run the bulk of the sites that we link to. Typically this means between 5 and 20 page views per visit.

Others Users: We do provide links for others who have an interest in labour links. Others users include: users that provide services to labour organizations, users that study labour issues, and users that regulate relations between labour and management.

Most of our links to labour interest sites come from this group of users. We post links to their sites so that organized labour officials can 'see what's out there'. These users do look around quite a bit, typically about 40 page views. Generally, they simply look over the scope of our link pages, but they don't access the linked sites very extensively.

From time to time, we are asked to help locate an organization that has seemingly disappeared. Usually we can uncover an amalgamation, or merger as the cause. Requests like these come from retirees and emigrated workers recollecting their old stomping grounds. Less frequently, we get a request for a link to an organization's site that hasn't posted a site yet. Of course, when we find them, we list them.
Clickthroughs, Eyeballs, Reach and Stickiness: Access to the sites we link to are all by the use of clickthroughs. Our click numbers are relatively low, but visitor satisfaction is a measure of quality, not quantity. That said, we still don't know much about our audience activity and behavior. The labour directory is very much a "Niche" market. By specializing, targeting, converting web site visitors into labour organization members we all gain. By constantly analysing our traffic stats we hope to build our site and brand. The web marketers term 'eyeballs' has come to mean the number of eyes that view a particular web site per day. As indicated above, we get many 'eyeballs' from around the world. Reach is defined as the percentage of visitors randomly surveyed that have visited a specific page in a given month. Because the overwhelming majority of our visitors never come back, reach is a very difficult measure for us to even begin to estimate. Stickiness, another marketing term, has come to mean the number of pages a particular surfer views before they move to another site. In other words, 'how long they stick around'.

Because we offer a link directory, without much actual labour content on the prevailing issues, these terms cannot be applied to this site. We maintain this point of view based on the following:
- Relative Link Volume: Using this service to find a suitable organization to join in a heavily organized state like California, USA takes considerably more activity, than doing the same for the Virgin Islands, USA. We say it's unrealistic to draw meaningful inferences about our users from 'the most popular pages' stats.
- Page Caching: Users are encouraged to save a copy of any page they want on their own machine. They can then, at their leisure click through the links to the resources they require without any involvement from our end. We've coded these link pages to permit users to do so. Undue page reloads and the associated churning are reduced for the user, hopefully providing them with a more enjoyable encounter. They can fill their needs quicker and sooner. Many users connect at very slow speeds and find it tedious at best to be forced to reload one of our pages simply to get access to the next link of interest.
- Resource Stability: Even though labour related organizations such as unions, libraries, legal services do come and go, as far as these pages are concerned, over the short term, they're here to stay. Although we continually add new links and update existing ones, once a surfer has made use of what we offer at that point in time, they move on. Because we don't offer much in the way of up-to-the-minute, late-breaking content, most users have little cause to keep coming back regularly. Terms of average collective agreements run about three years, but, if they've made the right choice, the bargaining unit typically renews their contract with the same bargaining agent.
A word about surfing while at work: We do not collect, gather or in any way monitor users accessing any of our site. We do collect simple page access and usage stats. We cannot identify who specifically is using our site unless they identify themselves to us in email. However, if you access the Internet from your place of employment, be aware that your employer can and probably does keep extensive usage stats on your activities. Those records can also include stats about accessing this site and its links pages. Consider surfing our site away from the office to avoid being put under mouse arrest!

Do you find this site useful? How can we improve this site for you? Please send us your ideas and comments! Use your own email account or our online comments form.