‘It is intimidating going into your first job’: Young teens and workplace safety

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative focus groups and interviews, this paper draws on participatory and relational approaches to explore how prospective and very new workers in their early teens in Canada talk about and navigate workplace safety. We foreground our young participants' discussions and safety management strategies to discuss their shared and sometimes narrow understanding of unsafe work; their mixed, and often limited, experiences of safety training; and the individualized avenues they prioritize to deal with potential and concrete safety issues. Countering our participants' inclination towards individualized solutions, we focus on how these young workers are embedded in relationships with others as well as the material world, including workplace cultures; networks and hierarchies of people; specific materials, time and time pressures; and safety‐related policies. Such a relational lens can in turn guide how we think about fostering workplace safety in ways that challenge more individualized approaches, specifically through recognizing interdependencies that shape how young people think about workplace safety; expanding beyond unidirectional, individualized educational strategies; and favouring shared self‐advocacy, especially with older workers, including through unionization.