On the occasion of International Youth Day, on 12 August 2024, the Working Youth Committee of the World Federation of Trade Unions expresses its internationalist solidarity with the militant young workers all over the world. We salute the struggles of the young workers for quality, free, and universal education, dignified working and living conditions, and affordable housing.
Unemployment and poverty rates of youth are steadily higher, while the youth are often deprived of even the most elementary rights, such as the right to healthcare, education, and decent living. Simultaneously, working youth are exploited as a cheap workforce with lower salaries, often by law, through informal work, part-time jobs, zero-hours contracts, and other forms of flexible work. Additionally, capitalists are taking advantage of teleworking, using it as a contemporary form of flexible work. The way employers exploit new technologies reproves that even the most admirable technological, scientific, and intellectual achievements of humanity are utilized for profit instead of improving people’s lives.
Moreover, data from the majority of countries show an increase in the number of young people who are neither in work nor in education or any training program. Hence, it is once again obvious that youth are the first victims of the capitalist crisis.
It is crucial for the class-oriented trade unions movement to promote in practice the equal participation of young workers in the activities and operations of trade unions, ensuring they can assume important positions of responsibility. It is essential to have faith in the role of the working youth, which can bring new blood, new dynamics, new life, and action to the trade unions.
The WFTU and its Working Youth Committee focus on strengthening the ideological level, class consciousness, and skills of its young trade unionists. The youth is the future of the trade union movement, the future of the struggles of the working class.
In this framework, and understanding the need for the youth to be organized, militant and strong, the WFTU and its Working Youth Committee are organizing the 4th World Working Youth Congress in France, on 22-23 of November 2024 under the slogan: “Organized and Militant Youth, for dignified work and life”. In the Congress, dozens of young trade unionists and cadres of the WFTU from all around the world will discuss the challenges faced by the working youth and its recent struggles, and adopt an action plan for the period 2024-2029 organizing the struggles of the class-oriented working youth for these years.
Long live the international militant working youth and its struggles!
