A seminar about “Next Gen Union: Igniting youth power in workers’ organisations” brought together representatives of workers’ organisations from Cyprus, Greece, France, Romania, Spain, Belgium, Serbia, Portugal, Lithuania, Czech Republic to address the generational crisis facing the labour movement. It took place from 13 to 15 May 2026 in Larnaka / Cyprus and was organised by KIKEA-DEOK (Cypriot Institute of Training/Education and Employment (KIKEA) - DEOK), in cooperation with EZA and funded by the European Union.
Important aspects of the seminar
With the average age of European union members now between 40 and 50 and density having fallen from over 40% in the 1980s to around 16% today, the seminar examined the structural barriers preventing young workers from joining and leading unions, shared innovative engagement strategies, and confronted the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the labour market. A central finding was the emergence of an "entry-level squeeze": generative AI now automates precisely the junior-level tasks that historically trained the next generation of professionals, threatening both youth employment and the long-term pipeline of experienced workers. The seminar also highlighted that algorithmic management is already a lived reality for millions of young workers across Europe, and called on unions, employers, governments and EU institutions to enforce the AI Act and Platform Work Directive, invest in AI literacy, fund reskilling at scale, and create genuine youth structures within unions with real decision-making power — not merely consultative roles.
Significance of the seminar taking place at this period of time
The timing of this seminar could not have been more consequential. Europe stands at the intersection of two converging crises: a generational gap within the trade union movement and an accelerating technological transformation of the labour market that is reshaping work faster than institutions can respond. The EU AI Act's core provisions entered into force in February 2025, making AI literacy a legal obligation for employers — yet awareness among workers and their representatives remains critically low. The Platform Work Directive, adopted in 2024, extends protections to millions of platform workers for the first time, but its impact depends entirely on unions having the knowledge and capacity to enforce it. Simultaneously, youth unemployment across the EU averages 15%, with some member states exceeding 25%, while generative AI is eliminating the entry-level roles that have historically served as the gateway into skilled employment. This seminar held at precisely the moment when the regulatory architecture is in place but implementation and enforcement remain nascent, when the technological disruption is advanced enough to be measurable but not yet irreversible, and when the window to shape — rather than merely react to — these changes remain open.
Topic fields
EU Framework & Workers’ Rights “Youth, Trade Unions and the European Social Model»
Innovative Strategies for Youth Engagement
Youth Participation in Trade Unions: Barriers and solutions
Leadership Skills for Young Trade Unionists
Youth Participation in Trade Unions: National Perspectives
The Future of Work: How AI and Digitalisation Affect Young Workers
Results
The European Seminar opened with the keynote speech from the Permanent Secretary of the Cypriot Minister of Labour, who framed youth engagement in workers' organisations as both a social imperative and a prerequisite for the continued relevance of the European Social Model.
The thematic sessions that followed on the second day explored this reality from multiple angles. The European Commission addressed the gap between the rights guaranteed on paper by the European Pillar of Social Rights and their lived experience by young workers, particularly those in precarious, platform-based or informal employment. The next session traced the long arc of declining union density — from over 40% in the early 1980s to approximately 16% across OECD countries today, with some member states recording figures as low as 4.3% — and identified six structural forces driving this trend: the failure of generational renewal, the perceived irrelevance of traditional union structures to modern workplaces, the slow adoption of digital organising, the mismatch between legacy campaign priorities and what young workers actually care about, the fragmentation of employment through precarious contracts and platform work, and the wider collapse of institutional trust among younger generations.
It was then presented a comprehensive framework for developing young union leaders through public speaking, negotiation training, confidence building and ethical representation, and arguing forcefully that the missing ingredient in most youth programmes is not education or mentoring but genuine decision-making power.
A very important session took place with the eight national delegations, whose contributions revealed both the diversity of national contexts and the remarkable consistency of the underlying challenges. From Spain's landmark Riders Law — which granted platform workers employment status and algorithmic transparency rights after years of sustained union campaigning — to the Czech Republic's youth forum model, which has already produced several national executive members from its ranks, the national perspectives demonstrated that where unions invest seriously in youth participation and adopt innovative strategies, measurable progress is achievable. Belgium's pioneering collective agreements requiring gig platforms to explain algorithmic decisions, Lithuania's AI literacy training for shop stewards, and Romania's mentoring programmes pairing young representatives with experienced negotiators all offered transferable models grounded in real-world results.
The last day widened the lens further. Dr. Christodoulos Efstathiades Assistant Professor of the University of Limassol delivered the seminar's most technically demanding session, distinguishing between three fundamentally different paradigms of artificial intelligence and explaining why generative AI represents a historic threshold: for the first time, the non-routine cognitive tasks that have always been considered safe from automation — the drafting, analysis and entry-level work that trains each generation of professionals — are now substantially exposed. His warning about the "entry-level squeeze," in which AI-assisted senior workers produce what junior teams once produced and thereby weaken the economic rationale for hiring young people at all, resonated powerfully across the room. He also documented that algorithmic management is already a lived reality for the majority of platform workers in Europe, that younger workers face disproportionately high rates of digital surveillance, and that in many workplaces employees are effectively training the systems designed to automate their own roles, without consent or compensation.
The seminar's conclusions were addressed to four distinct groups of actors, each with specific and immediate responsibilities. Trade unions were called upon to create youth structures with genuine authority — real budgets, elected leadership and representation at governing bodies — rather than consultative arrangements without power, while also developing AI literacy as a core competency and negotiating technology agreements that secure transparency, human oversight and reskilling commitments wherever AI enters the workplace. Employers were reminded that providing AI literacy training is a legal obligation since February 2025 under the EU AI Act, that consultation before automation is required by law, and that eliminating junior roles to achieve short-term efficiency gains risks collapsing the professional pipeline their own organisations depend upon. National governments were urged to enforce the Platform Work Directive and the EU AI Act rigorously, to protect entry-level employment through targeted incentives, and to fund lifelong learning at a scale genuinely proportionate to the pace of technological disruption.