- Conference
- 2019 National Delegate Conference
- Date
- 25 February 2019
- Decision
- Carried as Amended
Conference welcomes TUC Year of the Young Worker and congratulates all of the work being planned nationally, in regions and branches to promote recruitment of young worker’s, improve participation of young worker representatives and highlight issues especially relevant to young workers.
It notes examples like those in Eastern region, where Eastern region Young Members Committee have designed and planned a programme of activities throughout the year, including “Uncomfortable YET” a region wide campaign to highlight harassment in the workplace and UNITY Festival to be held in Norfolk on the weekend of 30 August to promote trade unionism through music, the arts and politics.
Conference agrees there is an urgent need to bring more young workers into the trade union movement to help maintain and improve bargaining power and to ensure the building of sustainable union organisation. Evidence by the TUC shows that if by age 26 workers have not joined a trade union then in all likelihood they will not do so.
Year of the Young workers provides the ideal opportunity to deliver an intensive young-worker focused programme of properly resourced recruitment, organising, and campaigning. A programme of events and campaigns involving the whole union not just Young Members and supported by the necessary organisation and financial resources.
Conference also recognises that Year of the Young Worker represents the start of a renewed longer-term commitment to developing young worker representation in UNISON. The undoubted progress being made will be lost unless we embed our commitments in future work plans thereby creating a legacy that will ensure we have a vibrant union now and in the future.
Conference therefore calls on the National Executive Council to:
1)Encourage all parts of the union to use Year of the Young Worker to plan and deliver a programme of activities in 2019 aimed at recruiting, developing and supporting greater participation of young workers;
2)Review the effectiveness of activities delivered across the union in support of the TUC’s Year of the Young Worker;
3)Prepare and distribute a report detailing all such activities, drawing on lessons to be learned from the year, and use these to establish a future strategy to build on improving organisation of young workers;
4)Consider that organising young members should be a distinct and separate objective of the union in 2020, and review this each year.