Empowering the integration of younger workers

Young workers are often underrepresented in trade unions, and even when they join they can find themselves excluded from union decision making. This is a problem not only in the transport sector, but in unions across the economy. That is why ETF participated in a project entitled “Empowering the integration of younger workers in the European Metal, Transport, Food, Services, Construction and Wood”. This project was carried out in 2015 and 2016 by EFBWW, EFFAT, EPSU, ETF, IndustriAll and UniEuropa with the financial support of the European Commission.

The project aimed to support the efforts of national trade unions to better attract and integrate young workers into their structures and involve them in their decision making processes. To achieve this objective, the following activities were organised:

• A European Youth Conference on 14-15 May 2015 in Dubrovnik (Croatia), which gathered around 150 young workers to exchange best practices and innovative approaches for the recruitment and integration of young workers and to prepare policy recommendations for trade unions at national level. 
• Four regional seminars disseminating the outcomes of the European Youth Conference in 2016. 

As a result, a compendium of best practices from all over Europe on how to integrate young people into trade unions was developed. The experiences were collected through questionnaires and interviews carried out among young unionists and workers represented by six European trade union federations.