European YCW (JOC Europe) is an organisation of young workers from several different countries. It is a member of an International YCW (IYCW) movement existing in five continents. In Europe there are YCW members right across the continent, from North to South and from East to West.
The YCW is a Movement that educates through action. A school of life. Starting out from young workers' daily life, experiences and aspirations, the YCW uses a method to SEE (analyse), JUDGE (reflect) and ACT to create change. We meet together to analyse the collective problems young people face in their working and day to day lives. In the process, young people grow more aware of their situations, and discover what they want to change to create a society that reflects the values of solidarity and human dignity.
We want to join forces and get organised so that we can direct our thoughts, aspirations and energies towards improving the quality of life for all. For this reason, we attach a lot of importance to training young activists who can create and lead groups, communities and teams in order to put an end to existing inequalities.
We are open to everyone who wishes to get involved in our projects, but we give the highest importance to the active participation of young workers in all levels of the organisation. We are active at a local, national and international level through actions and activities promoting our vision of solidarity and justice for all.
Our task also includes representing young workers at the level of political institutions in Europe.
For all these reasons, we invite you to get to know us better!
Come and join us!
Objectives
The aim of our Movement is to educate through action. Our objectives are:
To help ourselves - young working class people to learn by discovering and grappling with the realities of daily life - to become empowered, to think and take responsibility for ourselves, and to take action for change in our lives and the lives of those around us.
To create places where we can meet, discuss, reflect with others on the problems that directly affect us, to get organised and to get the training we need to put things right.
To help us understand who we are and where we are, so that we can decide for ourselves what we want to do and who we want to become.
To enable us to act against the injustices and problems we encounter in the different areas of our daily lives.
Demands of JOC-Europe
The YCW is an international Movement of young workers, for young workers, run by young workers. In the YCW, young people learn through action, to analyse, evaluate, and thus to understand their situations so that they can place them in a wider context and take action to change them.
In recent years YCW Europe's work has taken the form of a campaign against social exclusion and for an intercultural society. Through many of our local actions and projects, we have been able to identify the problems we young people experience on a day-to-day basis and to develop alternatives. The experience gained through the local actions and projects has been pooled and discussed at national and European levels.
This process also helped us to arrive at a more concrete definition of what we mean by social exclusion and an intercultural society.
Using the knowledge gained from pooling all our local actions we have developed this Bill of Demands, which voices the aspirations we young workers most cherish.
European Actions
The idea of the European coordination (JOC Europe) is to enable us to act collectively towards a common objective, with a vision for international change.
We start by learning from each other through exchanges of action and reality, and through this, identify the common links so that we can ensure the coordination of action experiences in the different countries and regions, and provide means of training and education that help form new leaders to continue to build the movement.
The following means are used to achieve these goals:
Action Exchanges:
- We invite the different movements to send activists to an action exchange to share experiences of their action with other national movements, with an objective of learning from each other, receiving constructive criticism and developing new strategies to help strengthen the impact of the actions.
- Members of the European coordination team visit national movements with an objective of understanding the reality in which the movement exists, of developing a more profound understanding of the action being developed, and strengthening the use of the method of the YCW in practice in the action process to ensure the formation of leaders.
