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12 August, 2026"We don't stay young forever. The movement does, if we let it," writes assistant general secretary Christina Olivier.
My father was a truck driver. My mother was a domestic worker for the same white family. As a child growing up under apartheid in South Africa, I watched the way they were treated, the deference expected of them simply because of the racial and social realities of the time. Those experiences planted the seeds of resistance.
When I started working in a small electronics company where most of the workers were women, I recognized the same power dynamics on the factory floor. I asked difficult questions. I pushed back when consultants were brought in to time workers and squeeze out more production. Because of that, I became a shop steward as a young woman, stepping in for a colleague on maternity leave. I never looked back.
I tell this story on International Youth Day for a simple reason. When I look at young workers now, I see a reflection of myself: curious, questioning, determined. Someone made space for me. That is the debt every generation of trade unionists owes the next.
We don’t stay young forever
Here is the hardest truth about renewal in any movement: none of us stays young. A union that treats its young members as the leaders of some distant tomorrow will wake up one day without leaders at all.
And let us be honest: making space is not always comfortable. Every generation worries about losing influence, about handing over things it built. I understand that fear. But leadership is not diminished by sharing responsibility. It is strengthened by it. The alternative is not holding on to power. It is watching the movement shrink around us.
Young workers are not waiting for us to resolve that discomfort. In July, out of a youth academy in the Philippines, came a plan for a regional labour education campaign on TikTok and Instagram, aiming to reach 4,000 young workers and recruit 700 new members across seven countries within six months. It is led by young unionists like Jean Faye Daguman, co-chair of our new Asia Pacific regional youth committee. That is not the future of organizing. That is organizing.
What young workers bring
This is why youth representation is a strategy, not a demographic exercise. Young workers are organizing in sectors unions have often struggled to reach. They understand digital organizing, platform work and new forms of precarious employment because they live them every day. They bring new tools alongside the values that have always defined our movement. If we are unable to organize young workers, very soon we will talk about IndustriALL as an organization that existed a few years ago.
From demand to structure
Young workers in IndustriALL have been building patiently for more than a decade, from the first regional youth networks to the 2021 Congress resolution that declared: “The future is ours, the future is now!” At our 4th Congress in Sydney in November 2025, affiliates answered. We amended our statutes, set a target of 30 per cent youth representation at all levels and created a global youth committee fed by regional structures.
Within months, young workers founded regional committees in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa and Asia Pacific, joining long-standing structures in Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe. The United Nations theme for this International Youth Day is “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations,” and I can think of no better illustration: a young miner in South Africa, a garment worker in Cambodia and an apprentice in Argentina live very different realities, yet they are building the same movement.
On 28 May 2026, the global youth committee met for the first time, and two youth representatives now sit on our Executive Committee as full members. Nobody handed them this architecture. They built it.
I am especially committed to young women finding their rightful place in our unions. I know the barriers they face because I faced them myself. When young women lead, entire communities benefit.
What comes next
The global youth committee meets again in September and its first youth policy goes to our Executive Committee in November. My message to affiliates is simple: open your structures, share your resources and trust young workers with real responsibility.
For me, leadership has never been about position or status. It has always been about service. The strongest legacy any of us can leave is a movement in better hands than we found it.
We don’t stay young forever. The movement does, if we let it.