Our Insular Ideas about Adolescent Work Injuries

Monday, September 22, 2014 | 1

It is shift’s end at the factory, and you’re holding a movie camera in front of the entrance. These workers are a composite of the entire American workforce. Your camera captures hundreds as they stream out. You notice a clutch of underage workers and train your viewfinder on them. Later you crop your film and show it to an audience. Your visual image is close to how we view adolescent workers as a special class. 

Adolescent risk injury policy-making appears to insulate itself not only from the rest of occupational injury prevention but even from advances in the science of adolescent development. Other groups of workers leaving this make-believe factory share many key characteristics with the kids in the cropped film. But one really doesn’t know the truly unique issues of the kid workers. And there are more all the time. As of this writing, four-fifths of teenagers have had some work experience before they complete their high school education. About 1.4 million 16- and 17-year-olds are formally employed. 

To reduce work injuries, one needs to be clear about what is contributing, close at hand or environmentally, to making injuries happen. There is a point of view that adolescent workers have unique risks as adolescents, just as workers with low English proficiency are at greater risk of injury. But it is easy, by cropping to the particular demographic, to snap a misleading picture. One could attribute a common risk factor as one that is unique to the particular demographic. This misjudgment leads one to overlook lessons from outside the demographic to prevent injuries and mitigate the severity of injuries that do occur. It also confuses the picture of the risk factor that is, in fact, unique to the demographic.

For instance, being new on the job, or relatively new, is a common risk factor across the workforce. Much has been written about how work injuries happen more often in the first six months of employment than later on. Adolescent employment tends to have relatively very short tenures. Protecting new hires from injury is an economy-wide challenge for which answers can crop up almost everywhere. 

As another example, low-wage immigrant workers are known to have low health literacy, which probably contributes to a lack of understanding about the nature of injuries and may increase the chance of injury. To be sure, health literacy is poor among native-born Americans, but immigrant workers may be uniquely influenced by traditional medicine interpretations of injury and illness. So a special educational effort customized for these workers is called for.

Shielding children from exploitation by employers was one of the great populist campaigns of the late 19th Century. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 authorized the federal government to treat young workers as a special class from which whole industries as well as specific tasks are barred.

Over time, injury risk has evolved. To take one of a flood of possible examples, adolescents are barred from operating certain kinds of saws. Carpentry is experiencing a surge of injury-preventing, productivity-improving innovations in saw use.   

But also, the very concepts of childhood and adolescence have evolved and the age brackets have destabilized. The dominant age brackets in the past have been from 14 through 17. In other words, “children.” Those below 14, with very specific exceptions as in agriculture, are excluded from workforce analysis. Workers over 17 are outside the frame. But researchers started fairly recently to extend their definition to include workers 20 years old, and older. A scholar of adolescence, Laurence Steinberg, in his just published and essential-to-read book Age of Opportunity, extends adolescence from age 10 to 25. 

Adolescent workers have higher injury risk than all other workers, according to researchers. Getting to the higher injury rates involves some complicated data analysis and a little guesswork. Simo Salminen, a Finnish researcher, compiled study findings from several countries, concluding that “young men had a higher injury rate than older men, as compared to young women versus older women. The injuries of young workers were less often fatal than those of older workers, because young workers resisted impacts better than older workers.”  

Policy and research today come under the shadow of a broad review by the Department of Labor of the youth labor force in 2000 and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health’s lengthy review of “hazardous orders” in 2002. 

Researchers and policy makers often list key factors adding to work injury risks for adolescents. These lists appear to be written in isolation from evidence about injuries among adults and about related issues like teenager driving accidents. There appears to be no recognition that the cited risk factors are pervasive throughout other demographic groups. Their insularity badly truncates understanding of how to mitigate these risks, or even to know what they are.

Temporary work. Inexperience on the job. Informal task assignment. Informal supervision. Poor worker and supervisor knowledge of labor rights. Physical capacity limitations. Low worker power status. Each of these injury risk factors is well-known in the adult workforce for increasing the chance of injury. Most are well-documented. To draw upon adult work lessons, the first step is to recognize commonality.

In Part 2 of this column, we will explore how we can improve our understanding of and skills in reducing work injuries of our youth.

Further Reading:

Department of Health and Human Services. Health and Safety of Young Workers: Proceedings of a U.S. and Canadian Series of Symposia. 2013.

Department of Labor, Report on the Youth Labor Force. 2000.

Institute for Work and Health. Systematic Review of Risk Factors for Work Injury among Youth. Institute for Work and Health. 2005.

National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Recommendations to the U.S. Department of Labor for Changes to Hazardous Orders. 2002.

Steinberg, Laurence. Age of Opportunity. 2014.