Work-Related Injuries

This is very upsetting because these are just teenagers, and seeing how they are missing school because of injuries is taking away their right to learn. Many companies do not even care about who they hire as workers, some hiring even the youngest fourteen year olds. These teens are prone to get many injuries, for example third-degree burns from an oil spill in a kitchen, which could have been prevented. Teenage work-related injuries are not uncommon, and with the proper precautions, these injuries may be prevented with the employer taking action on things that are hurting these teenagers.

First, there are many teenage related injuries in many jobs. A young sixteen year old crew cook in a fast-food restaurant was pushing a container of hot grease from the kitchen outside for filtration. When he went to open the door, the hot grease tipped over, spilled on him, he was hospitalized with many second and third-degree burns all over his body. This just shows that a young worker should not be doing this kind of work at this age. In New York and its surrounding states, the average frequency for teenage work-related injuries was in the mid five hundreds, which is incredibly high just for work-related injuries. The median days away from work were 4, which is a very high amount of days away from work for work-related injuries for teens under the age of eighteen. Many of these injuries were occurring in grocery stores, as well as eating and drinking places. As well as many of the injuries occurring in common places, a lot of the injuries were the same. Many of the injury-related teens experienced falling on the job, overexertion from lifting, and some were caught or compressed in job-related equipment used on the job. Thus, there are many work-related injuries occurring, which need to be stopped one way or another.

Secondly, employers need to find ways to help prevent, or keep these work-related injuries less occurring. For instance, employers now can ask to see approval from the employee that they have trained for the specific job. Training for a job is almost essential but, without training teenagers have a higher risk of becoming injured while working, because they do not know what to do. Also, without training, employees can suffer from more serious injuries than people who have trained for their job. Another thing employers can do to prevent injuries is to keep supervision over the teenage workers on the job. Eighty percent of work-related injuries occurred without supervision on the job, which is an incredibly high amount considering how many adults work now. This means that teenagers are becoming more independent in their jobs, and are now working with no adult supervision around. Employers who are assigning jobs, as well as keeping adult supervision over the teenagers, must ensure that the teenagers are only doing what they were hired to do. Many teenagers are being asked to fill-in for other employees when they are out. For example, a young teenager who is working in a fast-food restaurant that is the cashier may be asked to cook or clean one day, if one of there fellow employees are absent that day. This extra work can also result in work-related injuries because the adolescents are not trained to do this work, are not familiar with it, and therefore may get hurt doing it. Hence, there are many precautions employers need to take before hiring young employees for their jobs.

There are many work-related injuries occurring, and not enough care from the employers is put into stopping these injuries. Adolescents without training are likely to become injured on their job, because of the lack of experience. Employers need to make sure that these teenage workers are put under adult supervision while on the job. Also, employers need to make sure that these young workers have training prior to being hired, and that they are not doing any more work than assigned. Work-related teen injuries need to be stopped immediately or at least lessened.