Five Ways to Improve Work Safety for our Adolescents

Monday, September 29, 2014 | 0

Editor's note: This is Part 2 of a series on adolescent work injuries.

Twenty million kids below the age of 18 are at work, almost all part-time, mostly in fairly safe employment. Federal and state laws bar them from the more hazardous jobs (such as mining) and tasks (such as using power saws). Still, several hundreds have died at work in recent years, and their rate of nonfatal injuries, government records tell us, is higher than for the general workforce.

I described in an earlier column how, despite the dedication of youth researchers and policymakers, we can and should move forward on work safety for these kids. One barrier:  The child work safety community focuses on just the under-18-year-olds at work, blinding them from insights elsewhere.

Here are five ways in which both research and policy can improve:

One. Listen to personal driving safety experts about adolescents.  

You hardly see any mention of personal driving by teens in the very large literature on adolescent work injuries. Adolescents younger than 18 incur more than 10 times the fatalities while driving than they do at work. There is “plenty of evidence” that says the legal driving age should be later than age 16, according to Laurence Steinberg, an expert on adolescents, whose new book, Age of Opportunity, is a gold mine of insights.

Allowing under 18-years-old teens to drive is roughly similar to the state of Texas prohibiting the use of football helmets in high school football and leaving it to experts to devise urgent measures to prevent head injuries – or induce the kids to play soccer. In contrast to formal federal and state bars to dangerous work for workers under 18 years old, our driving laws place these people in harm’s way on the road. What better way to understand how teens behave than to study their driving and safe driving programs?

States have been embracing graduated drivers’ license programs for them. There is good evidence this reduces teenager driver-related accidents, including fatalities. Adolescents are good candidates for closely supervised graduated or progressive entry into occupations and specific tasks. Maybe safe driving programs will help to encourage more safe work programs.

Two. Bolster our understanding of how to mitigate age-specific causes of adolescent injuries and fatalities. 

We need more detailed information about kid’s injuries. Kimberly Rauscher and colleagues have been reporting that youth fatalities at work are not adequately investigated from the perspective of child labor laws, and that violation of hazardous orders and other youth labor standards occur frequently.  

We know that young people’s yet-mature bodies are more vulnerable to certain chemical agents. As for physical capacity, Susan Isernhagen, an expert in functional capacity, wrote me that teens’ “physical structures may have growth plates and less-developed muscles and tendons, which can be damaged by too much activity, including heavy repetition. Thus, some 15 year olds may not actually be done with growth and would be more at risk of injury and damage than a mature body adult."

In addition, science tells us that while adolescents perceive risks about the same as adults, they are willing to accept much higher odds of loss than adults. They are prompted to behave in risky ways among peers when unsupervised. Lack of sleep compromises safety of adolescents not just due to fatigue but because it impedes their self-regulation. 

Three. Learn from the general workforce workforce.

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. Some are well-documented. Use adult workers as a massive learning source. I see similarities (and differences) between a 16-year-old native-born worker and a 37-year-old Honduran worker on the first day of employment. 

Four. Do more in-depth studies of the safety culture in those worksites where kids incur a big risk of serious harm.

An example is Kristina Zierold’s investigation of adolescent employment by parents. She carefully documented how employment by parents is in significantly more dangerous fields of work than other teen employment. This is partly due to the fact that working for parents includes a lot of high-risk farm work, which federal and state agencies usually allow for even very young workers. 

Five. Expand the scope of research and policy beyond 17 to up to 25 years in age.

Just as there is no scientific justification to handing a teenager a key to the car at age 16, neither is 18 the scientifically justifiable age to stop looking at adolescent-related risks.  The 18-year cap on youth employment research was set by legislators, not scientists, generations ago. Behaviors and attitudes found in 17 year olds are alive and well in 22 year olds.

Laurence Steinberg ends his book by writing that we cannot afford to squander opportunities to “help young people be happier, healthier, and more successful. Adolescence is our last best chance to make a difference” on character and accomplishment. Adolescence is our first step into the adult world of productive employment. We can make that step safer.

Further Reading:

Laurence Steinberg. Age of Opportunity