Emma Rolland for Regional Young Members Convenor

Check out here about AGM

"I am currently the Regional Young Members Convenor and also a member of the Regional Young Members Forum.

Young members have been particularly affected by the current economic climate and this gives the union the opportunity to recruit, organise and engage young workers to give them protection and support but also to build and strengthen the union for the future. I believe this should be a priority for the coming year.

If re-elected I would work with the Regional Young Members Forum to build and improve the young members organisation in London by:

• Ensuring that all branches elect a Branch Young Members Officer (less than 10% of our branches have one now)

• Increasing the number of members that join and participate in the Regional Forum to give young members a voice in London

• Encouraging branches to make recruiting young members part of their branch recruitment strategy and looking at resources they need to do this

• Encouraging young members to participate both in national campaigns such as Minimum Wage Campaign, as well as regional campaigns such as the sexual health awareness campaign.

In my experience trade unions can sometimes be considered by young people to be out of date and not relevant, I would like to continue to work with the YM forum and the Regional Council Officers to look at how we communicate with members and non members under 27 to change this perspective and demonstrate that trade unions are as relevant today as ever before - all too often young people are treated unfairly purely because of their age and face harassment, bullying and discrimination in addition to the issues that all public sector workers face such as attacks on terms and conditions, below inflation pay rises and privatisation. Trade unions are the key to protecting our members and challenging the issues we face at work.

Unfortunately no regional young members have taken place this year due to low attendance and I want to speak to young members to find out why they aren’t engaging at local level and how we can resolve this situation and build the Regional Young Members Forum in 2010.

We are the future of the union and recruiting young members is vital. Without encouraging more young people to join and then to become active at branch, regional and national levels the future of the union will suffer".