Young Workers’ Assembly

Taking inspiration from Citizen’s Assemblies, the Young Worker’s Assemblies are run in collaboration with Prospect and the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). The assembly is an opportunity for young workers to discuss issues that affect their career, and to provide a space to develop ideas and solutions to them. These solutions are then consolidated into motions which we can present to members, and if passed, take them up with management. All of this is an effort to unify the voices of young workers within the organisation and to ensure that they are heard.

The assemblies themselves are run every three months. We first start by posing a question to Prospect members and asking them to give their thoughts and ideas via a ThoughtExchange. This has proven to be a very useful tool, given its anonymity and that it allows members to vote and rate existing thoughts. From here, the most popular becomes the topic for discussion for the assembly itself. The assembly is run in hybrid form over lunchtime, making use of both physical and virtual breakout rooms, where members discuss the chosen topic, including the issues surrounding it and what could be done to improve conditions.

Running this event for the first time has presented some challenges, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. While there were initially some reservations from the organisation about a trade union run event being used as a forum for negativity, we have demonstrated that the Young Workers’ Assembly provides a forum where workers feel comfortable to openly suggest and discuss solutions that UKAEA could implement to improve their experience. This platform gives the opportunity for workers to be open in a way that they may not have felt able to with senior staff.

It’s taken some experimentation to find a format that runs as smoothly as possible, and we’re still making improvements at each assembly. Group sizes need to be large enough to get diverse ideas, but small enough that everyone in the room gets their voice heard. Discussions must be long enough for young workers to share their thoughts in detail, but also need to fit within the lunchtime slot that the assembly runs in. We’ve found that 20–30-minute discussions chaired by young Prospect reps in breakout groups of 5-10 people have proved really productive, resulting in a wide variety of great ideas and solutions.

We’ve found our Young Workers’ Assemblies to be a productive and open forum that wasn’t previously available to young employees of UKAEA. It would be amazing to see this concept used in other Prospect branches, as it has been a great way of getting young workers active within the trade union and has provided a platform to make meaningful change in our workplace.