Young Worker Project
Founded in 2019, the Young Worker Project was initially developed as a response to the energy of youth-led student climate strikes and now serves to both understand the perspectives of young workers and train them to be better suited for winning climate demands in the workplace and in their communities. In the past decade, we have recorded the ten hottest years on record in modern history. For our younger generations who have inherited the problem of global warming, the threat of climate disaster has been omnipresent, and as we have learned through our Young Worker Listening Project, it has indelibly shaped their organizing perspectives and personal outlooks on the future. At the Labor Network for Sustainability we know that the climate crisis will be fought and most deeply felt by the working class. At the most critical nexus point of labor and climate movements are young workers with a vested interest in economic and ecological sustainability. This project exists because we believe that by uplifting the voices of young workers in their unions and organizations, and by offering them a formal political education to carry forward, the labor movement can build militant climate power and the climate movement can learn the necessity of worker-led climate activism fostering aligned movements in the struggle to make a living on a living planet.
Young Worker Training Program
Our Young Worker Training Program[LINK] is designed to train young workers in the labor movement, environmental justice space, and community organizing spaces, how to take the problem of our lifetimes and connect it to the daily struggles of the working class. We teach an explicitly Marxist lens to analyze current systems of power and remind workers that their enemy is not their fellow worker, but instead the ruling class which forces us to be alienated from each other and the planet. We help young workers turn the problems they see in their workplaces and communities into actionable campaigns they can organize around and win. We also host nationwide workshops on the challenges facing young workers, especially young workers of color, and on the organizing initiatives that other young workers have successfully launched.
Our program seeks to empower young workers to silence the loud defeatism we hear about our inability to protect our planet, and instead channel our knowledge, skills, lived experiences, and anguish over the disasters we see happening everyday into coming together, building power, and demanding more from our workplaces and government.
Learn more about the free program and apply!
Young Worker Listening Project
Building on the model of the Just Transition Listening Project and facilitated in collaboration with the Center for Story Based Strategy, our young worker organizing committee, made up of union members who wanted to see their unions lead in the fight for climate justice, designed a survey and interview questions to understand how young workers are experiencing the intersection of economic and environmental crises and what they think we should do about it. Through a series of interviews, workshops, and group discussions, we collected data for the listening project report: Earth is a Hot Shop. The report chronicles the challenges faced by young worker climate activists, their successes, and how they envision a path forward in the labor climate movement.
Young Worker Convergence on Climate
In 2022, we hosted our inaugural Young Worker Convergence on Climate in Los Angeles, bringing together nearly 100 young workers from 23 states (as well as DC and Canada) and more than 50 different worker and environmental organizations. They gathered to participate in workshops, to hear from our union comrades who have successfully built labor power in service of climate justice, to share strategies across states and sectors, and to build a collective vision for a climate justice movement led by and for workers. Missed us at the 2022 YWCC? Check out some of the discussions:
Get Involved!
To learn more about the Young Worker Project and get involved, contact our Young Worker Organizer, Martina Manicastri at [email protected].