From 16 to 18 September 2022 took place in Cologne, Germany, a seminar about “Realities of young workers in Europe and the relevance of the ILO in their improvement”, organized by JOC Europe, in cooperation with EZA and the ILO, funded by the European Union. 7 representatives of workers’ organisations met personally in Cologne, other 20 participants joined online.
The key idea was to bring together the realities of young workers in Europe and the activities of workers’ movements with the work of the ILO that aims to improve these realities. The work of the ILO is not very well known in Europe and especially young people are not aware. On the other hand, the decisions of the ILO have no value if the member countries don’t ratify them. (Young) members of workers’ organizations need to know about the ILO as well as its decisions in order to lobby the results of the ILC in their home countries.
The world of work is changing rapidly, and especially young people face the down-sides of these changes: high demands on professional skills and work experience for many jobs, new forms of work that lack regulation, the digital sphere of work taking over private spaces or the decrease of protection in many jobs young people do are only some of the example of the developments of the recent years.
Some of these problems can be solved at a national level, but an increasingly interconnected world also needs increasingly interconnected regulation to protect workers’ right. Therefore, the role of the ILO can be crucial. This is only possible if all the different actors are aware and willing to support its efforts.
During the first part, the participants present in Cologne exchanged about the situation of youth in their countries and the problems they face. Each representative brought the analysis from their country and presented it to the others. This exchange served as a basis to take a look at the relevance of the ILO for young workers in Europe.
In the second part, Basma Mikhail (International Secretary of IYCW) presented the structure of the ILO and the advocacy work of IYCW and other organizations. She deepened also on the importance of the representation of workers’ organizations during the ILC.
In the third part, the seminar was opened to a hybrid webinar in order to broaden the discussion. Michael Watts (ILO Bureau for Workers' Activities (ACTRAV), Basma Mikhail (International secretary IYCW) and Alexis Fellahi (CSC Service d‘Etudes) discussed about the relationship between young workers, their realities and the ILO and answered the questions of the participants.
In the last part of the seminar, the participants evaluated their findings from the beginning in relationships with the new knowledge they achieved during the webinar.
Seminar results
The participants shared the realities and difficulties of young worker and identified certain commonalities:
- Young people feel a lot of pressure about how to organize their lives. This affects their mental health.
- Even though in their countries, many young people have formal work, this doesn’t protect them from being in precarious work. The precarity is part if the model of work young people find themselves in.
- Precarity is not only part of work, but of live in general: cost of living, cost of housing, cost of transportation are factors that make many young people to live in precarious situations.
- Al over Europe, migration plays an important role. Many young people in the organizations that participated are in fact migrants and face especially hard difficulties.
- Gender inequality remains as one of the big injustices in the realities of live of (young) people in Europe.
- The members of the LGBTQI*-community face a high risk of discrimination, not only in the workplace, but in all aspects of society.
- Discrimination and inequality seem to be increasing.
- Racism is still an aspect of the European societies that keeps many young people from being able to reach their goals. There is more and more awareness about the systemic aspect of racism and the role of each person in fighting it.
After the confrontation with the work of the ILO, the participants reflected about the role of the ILO and the necessity of bringing the different levels together. The results of this process were mainly questions that need to be addressed in the future:
- Why didn’t we know about the ILO before?
- What is the real effect on our daily lives?
- How can we make sure that the decisions taken also reflect the realities of young people and the difficulties we identified?
The participants defined important aspects for their future work in the networking and advocacy work:
- Networking and advocacy need to be circular – it should come back to the basis of the movement in order to mobilize and inform people there.
- It is crucial to act together as one common international movement and with other actors to represent the realities of young workers in the work of the ILO.
- There needs to be a link to the realities in the national movements.
- Representative action as the participation in the ILO need to change/improve something. They cannot exist only to exist but must be guided by the goal of improving the realities of young workers.