Adam Harmsworth, Delegate to TUC Young Workers’ Conference, personal capacity
Around 150 delegates and visitors – among them young Socialist Party members – attended the 2025 TUC (Trades Union Congress) Young Workers’ Conference on 22-23 March, to discuss major issues facing young workers today.
The conference came at a dramatic time to be a young trade unionist. The Tories have been thrown out for the first time in our entire adult lives, which should be a cause for celebration.
And yet, there are growing attacks on the working class from the Labour government and councils. Some speeches for the motions had to be rewritten when Reeves announced £2 billion being cut from the civil service on the Sunday.
Motions highlighted the horrific war in Gaza, the grim state of poverty pay especially for youth, a rising plague of harassment and bullying at work including sexual assault, mental health crises, and the far right.
The motions brought to the conference usually reflect the views of the trade union leaderships. They rarely call for radical change, even when many of the delegates want to see far more done for the working class. This led to many modest motions celebrating the work of the Labour government so far and calling for the TUC Young Workers’ Committee to campaign for more progress. But that contrasted with speakers for the motions attacking Labour for its horrendous failings and carrying out more austerity.
Young Socialist Party members were among the minority of speakers on the motions who used the platform to put forward the need to fight back against the Labour government, instead of hoping that Starmer will ‘do the right thing’. We discussed with other attendees about the need to build a socialist alternative to Labour’s agenda of cuts, war, and attacks on the working class, using the leaflet we were handing out as a route into discussion. We also sold our newspaper The Socialist at every opportunity outside Congress House.
Some speakers railed against the capitalist system itself, which is a welcome sign of the growing anger of youth and desire for real change, but that anger must be turned into action within the trade unions themselves.
Those delegates who want a real fightback need to help build combative and democratic trade unions to ensure the working class is able to fight these attacks and for socialist change. They should join or help build broad left formations, and fight for their unions to begin building a new mass working-class party to draw the class together against the pro-capitalist parties.
The conference reflected the anger young trade unionists feel at the crisis-ridden system we are in today and a desire for a better future. The task for the youth in the unions now is to campaign within our unions to prepare to fight against attacks both from Labour and from employers emboldened by the government, argue for a political voice for the working class, and challenge the union leaderships with a socialist programme.
