There is a historical trend to accuse new generations of being too "fragile" when we endure precariousness more intensely than any other age group, of being "lazy" while we chain temporary contracts, part-time jobs, and insufficient wages, of being "wasteful" when we allocate most of our income to rent or of being "a glass generation" when the reality is that we face a mental health crisis of an unmanageable magnitude for a society like ours.
This August, the International Youth Day is celebrated. It will also be the moment when we will again be pointed out as responsible for almost all the ills of our generation and even of society in general.
As we said, this discourse is not new. We already saw it when a labor market unable to offer quality jobs to young people and an educational system insufficiently prepared to combat early school dropout left thousands of young people without future expectations. Instead of pointing out the structural causes of that situation, our society coined the term "ninis" and shifted the responsibility to those who were, precisely, the main victims of that collective failure.
It is a pattern that repeats itself too often. It is much easier to turn collective problems into supposed individual failures than to confront the deep causes that explain why our economic and social model stops guaranteeing dignified living opportunities for an entire generation.
Young people have always been at the origin of great social transformations
That is why, for a young trade unionist today, it is imperative to continuously combat the prejudice that today's youth live detached from politics. First, because it is false and second, because it prevents understanding the true challenges of a generation that has decided to stop hiding its discomfort and, with it, find collective answers capable of transforming them.
Young people have always been at the origin of great social transformations. The history of class trade unionism in general, and of our union in particular, is a good example of this. Not because they were a separate or special subject, but because they were the ones occupying the new productive sectors, those who suffered from precariousness first, and those who forced the trade union movement to reinvent and reimagine its forms of organization.
It happened with industrialization, with internal migrations, with the massive incorporation of women into employment, and it is happening again today with digitalization, platforms, outsourcing, and the fragmentation and atomization of work. Youth is not and cannot be a sectoral issue for the union: it is the place where the mutations of the labor world manifest first.
That is why, from CCOO we are clear, what is truly transformative is to demonstrate that what seems like an individual failure responds to structural causes and, therefore, only admits collective responses. That is why we need to multiply spaces where youth can meet, debate, make mistakes, organize, and take on their own responsibilities. Not as recipients of youth policies, but as protagonists of union life.
It is enough to look back to see that only by intensifying shared experiences will we achieve hegemony over union consciousness. Our organization grew when it was also a space for socialization, training, and culture for entire generations. Promoting that dimension is not an exercise in nostalgia: it is a condition for strengthening class and confederal unionism in a time marked by isolation and individualization.
The modernity of unionism depends not only on its aesthetics but on its ethics
We must do it, moreover, from the conviction that incorporating young people into decision-making spaces does not respond to a logic of quotas or balances, but to a political and democratic necessity. Our organization can only interpret a rapidly changing world of work if those who make decisions incorporate the experience of those who inhabit it firsthand.
Young people do not ask for more modern organizations in the simple sense of the word, but, as I mentioned, at the forefront. It is not enough to invest resources in social networks, make many tiktoks, and spend a lot of time trying to decipher how to “use new languages.” True innovation consists of listening and adapting in new ways to this reality of frantic changes in order to organize those who are not yet there, but need us the most. The modernity of unionism does not depend only on its aesthetics, but on its ethics, on its ability to recognize before anyone else where the new working class is being born and to build organization alongside them. That is what will make us useful and will allow us to continue being who we are.
about the author:
Pau Garcia Orrit is the confederal secretary of Youth of CCOO