This conducted focus group interviews with teenagers in two Canadian cities to understand the types of work-related hazards experienced by them, how they respond to hazards & barriers to injury prevent.
Results:
Participants reported a range of physical & interpersonal hazards at current or previous workplaces. For several people, mostly female, who worked at the frontline of customer service shared incidents around customer-initiated sexual harassment & verbal abuse.
Nearly everybody reported being injured at work at some point however many “many participants viewed injuries as ‘part of the job” (p106).
A small number of participants, mostly male & those with longer tenures, said they would immediately speak out about a safety concern. But the most common response was patience; called a “wait-and-see” approach.
Participants feared losing their jobs or hours for speaking up & were well aware of the precarious nature of their employment. Thus, “participants tended to self-censored expression of safety concerns” (p106).
Another emerged theme was participants’ perceived powerlessness to raise issues, where inexperience & newcomer status reinforced feelings of fear. They explained newcomers are reluctant to raise issues because of how they thought others would perceive them & their inexperience on the job.
Authors say this highlights “age segregation” of young workers, where their inexperience creates an expectation that they do not need or expect opportunities to voice safety concerns or be active in making safety improvements.
A third theme associated with patience and the tolerability of hazards. The seriousness of hazards were seen by participants in their likelihood to result in hospitalisation. These issues marked a shift from patience to low level voice; although two participants said if it was a new job, they’d probably not saying anything as they would be too scared or intimidated. If it couldn’t result in hospitalisation then people preferred to tolerate the hazards
Overall, patience was the preferred short to medium-term response to safety concerns. Some thought it was “futile to pursue change”, while others simply did not care.
When a hazard was considered serious, many said they would try voicing. Voicing was consistent across focus groups: first they would complain to co-workers about safety concerns. This acted as an informal method to gauge opinion about whether others saw it as an issue to address.
Next when there was consensus, people would “try to establish an informal coalition to raise the issue with a supervisor or manager” (p107). Thus, safety voice was most often described as a collective act. In other less common situations, an outspoken worker would take the issue forward. Nevertheless, “trepidation and caution were the hallmarks of the voicing process” (p107).
Half of the participants said their current/former supervisors were genuinely open to listening to safety concerns. If voicing was ineffective, some would revert back to patience, while others would switch to neglect. Resignation was rarely considered, at least for initial or secondary response. Some said they would leave when they were completely fed up.
Overall, findings indicate that resistance to dangerous work were “episodic and punctuated sometimes lengthy periods of waiting and thinking about what to do about safety concerns” (p109). Voice was also a social process where co-workers were informally consulted.
Authors discuss some ways forward. One option included leveraging social marketing messaging which speaks directly to teenagers to speak up. This also included more information & awareness at school about workplace safety and voice.
SafetyInsights.org 