30th Jan 2008
Talking to Your Teen about Work
We don’t do much to educate teenagers in general about workplace safety or workplace rights, but recent Bay Area workshop is part of the solution of beginning a dialogue about these issues.
Teenagers are injured at twice the rate of adults in the workplace, which indicates more workplace safety training and awareness is necessary. And I don’t have any data about teenagers and sexual harassment at work, but stories about teens at Hollister and McDonald’s indicate that part of our conversation about work needs to include a discussion of sexual harassment as well.
The problem is that both are rarely discussed in detail, or they are parsed off to introductory training videos that no one pays attention to and are totally negligent of addressing the real issues.
Certainly the dumb training videos don’t seem to help. I think it’s something that parents have to address as well as the workplace, and keep the conversation going.