The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #48353

Chris Miara, MS, Education Development Center, Inc., 55 Chapel Street, Newton, MA 02458, 617-618-2238, cmiara@edc.org, Mary E. Miller, MN, ARNP, Department of Labor and Industries, P.O. Box 44510, Olympia, WA 98504-4510, Laurie Kominski, MSW, Youth Project, UCLA Labor Occupational Safety & Health Program, Hershey Hall, P.O. Box 951478, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1478, and Deborah Feldman, Research and Analysis Services, 5732 - 17th Ave. N.E., Seattle, WA 98105.

Panel: Promoting Young Worker Safety: New Tools and Techniques. To include: Protecting Young Workers: Institutionalizing a Training-of-Trainers Model; Using Peer Education Forums for Teaching Teens about Workplace Health and Safety; Supervising for Safety: Reaching Out to Managers of Fast Food Restaurants to Reach Teen Workers; Lessons Learned from an Evaluation of Washington State's Youth at Work Project. The panel will describe strategies to increase the safety of young workers. Teen workers are injured at higher rates than adults, often while working in violation of child labor laws and/or doing tasks for which they are inadequately trained. Surveys of teens reveal that they receive inadequate information about their legal rights on the job and occupational safety training, either before entering the workplace or at work. The adults responsible for the safety of teens-employers, teachers, job trainers and placement professionals-receive inadequate information about the characteristics of teens that place them at risk of occupational injury. Nor do they have the tools to educate and protect teen workers. The panelists will describe various curricula and training tools. They will describe how these tools are being used at many levels: teaching teens directly; training teachers, job placement professionals, and community-based program coordinators; training employers of teens; and providing guidance to state agencies about ways to institutionalize programs in schools, job programs, and community organizations, and worksites. Taken together, these projects show how occupational safety can become an integral part of the institutions and organizations responsible for the safety of youth.

Learning Objectives: Participants will be able to

• Identify key information young workers and adults responsible for their safety need to know
• Describe several tools for training youth and adults about occupational safety
• Describe state and local programs and organizations through which to reach employers, teachers, job trainers, and youth with occupational safety information and in which safety training can be institutionalized.

Keywords: Safety Training Materials, Youth at Work

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.