Safety on the job

If nothing else, child labor laws are designed to protect teens from physical harm by limiting where and when they are allowed to work. For this reason, one might expect that a teen's chance of getting injured on the job would be lower than that of an adult. Surprisingly, however, most studies come to the opposite conclusion. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has calculated that roughly 200,000 adolescents are injured on the job each year, a rate for 15- to 17-year-olds of five injuries per 100 full-time-equivalent workers; by comparison, the rate for workers over 16 was just under three. And the fatality rate among employed 16- to 17-year-olds was only slightly less than that of 20- to 24-year-olds (3.5 compared to 3.9 per 100,000 workers) even though child labor laws seek to ban minors from the most life-threatening jobs.

Working teens' self-reports seem to reinforce these statistics. Between 17 and 50 percent of working teens described having been injured on the job, according to a recent Institute of Medicine report, with between 7 and 16 percent reporting injuries serious enough to require medical attention. As the study's authors concluded, "Typical 'teen jobs' cannot be assumed to be safe. . . . [Various] factors may place younger workers at greater risk than adults confronted with similar hazards."

Some industries appear to be more dangerous than others. A cluster of recent studies has found that manufacturing and construction firms have unusually high rates of nonfatal injuries. Construction is especially dangerous, causing 14 percent of occupational fatalities among youths under 18 years of age, even though it employs less than 3 percent of working adolescents. The states of Washington and Connecticut have identified public-sector jobs (including summer jobs programs) as being especially risky for adolescent workers. And the Massachusetts Department of Public Health also recently declared trucking, warehousing, and retail bakeries to be high-injury industries.

Agriculture, which gets "special treatment" under federal and most state laws, is far and away the most life-threatening sector. Although just 8 percent of employed adolescents aged 15 to 17 years work on farms, agriculture accounts for 40 percent of all work-related deaths for children under 17.

The hazards seem to be greatest for older teens and for boys. Sixteen- and 17-year-olds have higher rates of injury than younger workers. This may be linked to the fact that teens under 16 are subject to working hours restrictions, and some states go even further than the federal laws to protect young teenagers from hazardous work. But it could also be that older teens have an inflated sense of their own abilities, or that employers give them more hazardous tasks.

Adolescent boys are injured at higher rates than their female peers, with males accounting for 90 percent of teen deaths on the job. Although it is true that boys are more likely to be working in the most hazardous jobs, they also seem to have higher injury rates even within occupations.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 1057