Youth
There are specific labour market and industrial relations conditions with regard to young people that make them distinct from other groups of workers, mainly as regards precarious employment.
For more information please contact Mina Vukojicic, Policy Adviser.
These problems faced by young people include abuse of power, inadequate pay, a high accident rate, a disparity between the acquired skills and the work done, the working hours demanded by the employer and the inability to become independent and access certain aspects of social welfare.
For many young working people, insecurity has moved beyond the issue of not having a fixed-term contract, gaining new dimensions that have more significance in many cases than the employment contract itself. There are other very important factors relating to working conditions for young people which need to be taken into consideration when defining a job as insecure.
This situation is all the more worrying because it is seen as a 'natural' and 'inevitable' state of affairs; furthermore, young people do not have adequate knowledge of the instruments available to deal with this situation; in other words, they see employment as an unfair, unregulated and informal framework. In the light of this situation, the trade union policy of the EMF, and of its Collective Bargaining Policy Committee in particular, is the right instrument for effecting major changes to the particularly precarious employment and working conditions affecting this group.
Promoting and securing links between young people and bargaining processes is crucial so that they can play a part in achieving improvements and have a direct knowledge of the difficulties involved in securing them.
