Revitalizing Union Action: The Impact Of Youth Committees In A Public Sector Labour Federation In Québec

This article examines the revitalization of a union federation's capacity to represent young workers. It presents a qualitative study of the role and impact of one of the most developed forms of youth involvement in a union, youth committees. It first analyzes the extent to which these committees helped put the concerns of members under the age of 30 on the union federation's agenda and fostered their participation in its internal life. Second, it examines the ways in which these committees initiated a degree of change in the federation at the institutional level. Overall, our findings indicate that youth committees were able to question existing practices and initiate a degree of union change. However, the disagreements expressed by the young workers tended to remain confined within these parallel structures, thus limiting their potential to change the representative capacity of the federation.