Health and Safety of Young Workers

Young workers warrant special consideration to foster a safe and healthful entr e to the world of work. While there is consistent evidence that young workers are at increased risk for injury in the workplace, largely due to inexperience, the solutions and path forward are not straight-forward. Efforts to facilitate opportunities for youth to gain meaningful job experiences that foster development of marketable job skills for their future need to be balanced with efforts to protect them from work-related injury and illness. Additionally, work is just one component of youths' lives and their transitions into adulthood. Family and social relationships and education are other important components of young workers' lives that have complex relationships with work that need to be considered. Research on the impacts of youth work is conducted in multiple disciplines, with little interaction between them. These include the fields of business, law, psychology, public health, sociology, and youth development. NIOSH co-funded, with the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation, a project that convened a unique series of symposia between 2007 and 2010 that brought together scholars from multiple disciplines, practitioners and business representatives from the U.S. and Canada to consider the implications of youth employment, and to make recommendations for moving forward, considering the complex relationships of work with other components of youth development. These Proceedings compile white papers (or subsequently published articles) that were developed to foster discussions at this series of symposia, along with an ambitious research and policy agenda that was spawned from these interdisciplinary discussions. White papers and articles were authored by business scholars, epidemiologists, health communicators, physicians, psychologists, and sociologists. These Proceedings serve as a foundation for fostering interdisciplinary attention to the complex issues surrounding young worker safety and health, and serve to inform the many stakeholders who did not attend the invitational series of symposia. These Proceedings will be useful to scholars from multiple disciplines, practitioners (e.g. safety professionals, unions, business leaders and educators), and policy makers interested in expanding their knowledge about young worker safety and health.