Young trade unionists from across Europe and Central Asia descended on Lithuania last month for the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU) youth network’s annual weekend of talks and discussions.
Among them was Eleesha Kyriazis, vice-chair of UNISON’s national young members forum and young members officer in Norwich City branch.
Here’s her report on a productive weekend.
Saturday’s opening session was Creating a harassment free zone: Within EPSU and beyond.
We split into groups to discuss common issues faced by young trade unionists in the workplace and in our own trade unions. We considered what conflict-resolution methods would be appropriate in different scenarios. We returned as whole group to feed into a new code of conduct, based on our experiences, which could be used in all EPSU meetings.
Next up was a section on young members structures across different affiliates. We looked at the results of a survey on the different ways unions engage their young members and I gave a short talk on UNISON’s own formal and informal structures for young workers.
I covered various different levels, starting with local branch representation via the young member’s officer role, elected by young members only, then the regional forums and their different positions, and then the national young member’s forum.
I explained how the YM forum has a reserved space to contribute to the different service groups through their committees and conferences.
And finally, I covered the different self-organised groups, and if we currently have designated representatives on their national committees or where we are looking to expand our reach.
After lunch, Oliver Philipp, policy officer at Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Germany’s oldest political think tank, gave a talk on The Future of Work.
We heard how only 20% of unions in EPSU have collective bargaining agreement on the use of artificial intelligence.
Next up was EPSU youth co-ordinator Chloe Kenny on the rise of the far right across Europe. She touched on the deregulation across the EU, making it easier for transnationals to do business, as well as the feared watering down of pay transparency and environmental protection laws.
All this has helped right-wing parties position themselves as ‘the voice of the worker’ – despite leaders having nothing in common with working people and agendas that are anathema to workers’ interests.
We had a discussion on how we might try to use our place within the trade union movement to better position ourselves as ‘the voice of the worker’ – not least as we actually are workers.
On Sunday, we had further discussions on the finalisation of the discrimination and harassment code of conduct and confirmed what we wanted included. After this we had a report on trade union membership trends and changes since the 80’s, mostly with a focus on the Ukrainian construction industry and successful recruitment methods.