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Journal of Youth Studies
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The practical potential of self-advocacy
for improving safety outcomes for
school-aged workers
Deanna Grant-Smitha & Paula McDonalda
a QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology,
Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Published online: 17 Jul 2015.
To cite this article: Deanna Grant-Smith & Paula McDonald (2015): The practical potential of self-
advocacy for improving safety outcomes for school-aged workers, Journal of Youth Studies, DOI:
10.1080/13676261.2015.1039966
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1039966
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The practical potential of self-advocacy for improving safety outcomes
for school-aged workers
Deanna Grant-Smith*and Paula McDonald
QUT Business School, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
(Received 21 April 2014; accepted 26 March 2015)
Young workers are over-represented in workplace injury statistics and there is growing
interest in addressing their vulnerability and safety exposure. Such concerns have been
raised within a broader discursive framework of responsibilisation which has seen a
transfer of responsibility for workplace safety from employer to worker. This article
examines the potential for self-advocacy as a strategy for improving the safety of
young workers through the provision of resources to articulate and act on workplace
rights. The study utilises data derived from 48 group interviews involving 216 high
school students (13–16 years of age) at 19 high schools in Queensland, Australia, who
were asked to discuss their knowledge and experience of workplace rights and
responsibilities. The limitations of the safety self-advocacy approach are explored,
including the social, developmental and organisational issues that might affect the
ability or willingness of school-aged workers to self-advocate. The findings reveal that
the notion of self-advocacy is internalised by young people before they even enter the
formal labour market but that in practice, attempts by young people to enact rights to
safety are often dismissed or undermined.
Keywords: work; employment; safety self-advocacy; responsibilisation; student
workers
Introduction
There is a significant and growing number of school-aged workers in the Australian
workforce who combine part-time work with full-time education (Mayhew 2005; Muir
et al. 2009).
1
It has been reported, for example, that between one third and one half of
secondary students are engaged in paid work at any time (ABS 2010; Smith and Wilson
2002) and that between 70% and 80% will have some work experience before they finish
secondary school (Aumann et al. 2007). School student participation in part-time
employment is supported by both parents and student workers on the grounds that
income employment experience can help to develop important interpersonal and time
management skills, as well as positive traits that will enhance future employability
(Mortimer 2010; Usher et al. 2014). As in other countries, the largest proportion of young
workers in Australia is employed within the retail trade and food service industries (ABS
2007; Mayhew 2000; Smith and Wilson 2002). School-aged workers are often subject to
precarious and insecure employment conditions and may be exposed to unsafe work
practices as a result of their inexperience, coupled with the occupational industries in
which they are employed.
*Corresponding author. Email: deanna.grantsmith@qut.edu.au
Journal of Youth Studies, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2015.1039966
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
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In light of the high representation of young workers in industries which disproportio-
nately expose them to workplace injury, it has been argued that the safety experiences of
young workers (Rauscher 2008) and the preventative behaviours that they use when
facing unsafe work (Tucker and Turner 2014) have received insufficient attention.
Available data suggest that across OECD countries, youth are over-represented in
workplace injury statistics and are more likely to be injured at work than any other age
group (SWA 2013; Vocaturo et al. 2007).
2
Australian statistics show, for example, that in
2009–2010, young workers (under 25 years) accounted for one-fifth of all work-related
injuries. This corresponds to an injury rate of 66.1 work-related injuries per 1000
workers; a figure that is 18% higher than the rate for adult workers [Safe Work Australia
(SWA) 2013]. Moreover, these figures are likely to under-represent the true extent of
workplace injuries for young workers due to factors such as the under-reporting of
accident compensation claims (see, for example, Quinlan, Bohle, and Lamm 2010);
methodological approaches that fail to capture the experiences of youth working in
family-owned or managed businesses (e.g. Gasson et al. 2003); and the fact that official
agencies often do not collect data on many young workers (Anderson, Hannif, and Lamm
2011). In Australia, for example, information collected by SWA confines its focus to
workers aged 15 years and older, whereas in some Australian states, young people can
legally commence supervised work, such as delivering newspapers, as young as 11 and
can enter most other workplaces at 13 years of age (WHSQ 2012).
In order to address the poorer workplace safety outcomes of young workers, there
have been calls for safety training which links knowledge with safe behaviour and
educates young workers not only on how to work safely, but empowers them to practise
safe behaviours in their workplace (e.g. see Blewett et al. 2014; Chin et al. 2010;
Thamrin, Pisaniello, and Stewart 2010). Safety training can be seen as part of a broader
challenge to the view that injuries are merely an unavoidable part of the job and
encourages workers to advocate for their safety rights (Chin et al. 2010). Such notions of
self-advocacy are based on the assumption that voicing safety concerns or refusing to
undertake unsafe work is ‘the right thing to do’(Tucker and Turner 2013, 104) and every
worker’s responsibility, regardless of their age, level of experience or organisational role.
Champions of self-advocacy promote the agency of young people to advocate for
workplace safety on the basis that once ‘taught how to self-advocate, youth can positively
impact the environments in which they work and contribute in more meaningful ways to
their job sites’(Chin et al. 2010, 572).
In this article we explore and comment on the practical realities of a self-advocacy
model for enhancing the safety of school-aged workers in Australian workplaces. The
study departs from the extant literature addressing young worker safety in several ways.
First, the study gives young people voice through data generated from youth themselves
about their actual and anticipated workplace experiences and the social context in which
they work. This voice is often absent in scholarship that describes or critiques
government policy or public discourse related to workplace safety, or which documents
injury statistics collected by formal agencies. Second, we focus on very young workers:
schools students who are concurrently participating in full-time education and who are in
the very formative years of labour market engagement. This focus allows for revealing
how safety knowledge and capacities emerge and develop. Even within the relatively
small body of work that is concerned with youth labour market experiences, relative to
adult workers, few studies have focused on young people still in high school. Finally, the
study bridges theory and practice in that notions of self-advocacy, responsibilisation and
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individualisation guide our analytic focus on how safety operates in practice in real
workplaces such as fast food outlets, cafes and retail stores, where young people are
typically employed.
Safety and the school-aged worker
A number of structural risk factors such as precarious employment condititions, short job
tenure and limited training, supervision and safety induction have been found to
contribute to the high injury risk among young workers (Breslin and Smith 2006;
Tranter 2009). Other physical and relational workplace dynamics have also been found to
increase risk. These include exposure to physical, ergonomic, chemical and biological
hazards; young workers’concentration in roles where they may have hazardous or
unpleasant tasks shifted onto them by more senior colleagues; and an increased
propensity, relative to adult workers, to work with cash, interact with customers and
work at high-risk times such as late and early shifts (Breslin and Smith 2013; Laberge and
Ledoux 2011; Mayhew 2007; Rauscher 2008). Young workers are also at higher risk of
harrassment, bullying and other psychological risks, particularly in workplaces associated
with the retail and food services sectors (Laberge and Ledoux 2011). Indeed, it has been
argued that there is an exponential increase in the probability of negative workplace
safety outcomes, when workers are both precariously employed
3
and young (LaMon-
tagne, Vallance, and Keegel 2008; LaMontagne et al. 2009; Mayhew 2005; Mayhew and
Quinlan 2002).
These structural and workplace factors –that is, the types of jobs young workers hold
and, by association, the hazards to which they are exposed (Breslin and Smith 2013)–
appear to account in large part for young workers’vulnerabilty to workplace injury.
However, behavioural factors are also presented as important, and sometimes the most
significant, contributing factor accounting for why young people are injured at work
(Barneston and Foster 2012). This argument purports that while young workers generally
occupy jobs at the bottom of hierarchies with limited power to change their circumstances
or risk exposure (Mayhew 2007), youth-specific vulnerabilities such as physical and
emotional development and differences in cognitive functioning are a significant factor in
young workers’elevated exposure to workplace hazards. Such views are based on the
supposed deficits of young workers, such as a tendency to attend work tired, or with a
hangover, due to social commitments or substance abuse (Pidd, Roche, and Wilson
2011). Other behavioural attributions for high workplace injuries are that young people
either deliberately or negligently engage in what are taken to be unsafe behaviours. Such
behaviours include refusing to wear personal protective equipment, being involved in
dangerous pranks, attempting to perform potentially hazardous tasks before they are
trained in order to impress co-workers, or the inability to independently recognise
workplace hazards due to their lack of experience (Youth Safe 2010).
This deficit-view of young workers’behaviours is endorsed by some employers of
young workers, who stereotype young people as self-interested and lacking in discipline
and communication skills, and as not possessing an appropriate work ethic (Price, Bailey,
et al., 2011). Such sterotypical views, supported by a more general assumption that
‘young people often think safety is someone else’s problem’(Youth Safe 2010, 1), permit
employers to position themselves as the victims of young worker’s unacceptable work
habits (Price, McDonald, et al., 2011). They also rationalise the tendency to pathologise
and disempower younger workers by effectively holding them responsible for their over-
Journal of Youth Studies 3
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representation in workplace injury statistics (Anderson, Hannif, and Lamm 2011). This is
despite little empirical evidence to support claims that differences in the developmental
characteristics of young workers have any appreciable impact on worker safety outcomes
once working conditions have been accounted for (Smith and Breslin 2013).
Notwithstanding these generally negative views of young workers and an increasing
recognition of the structural and systemic risk factors affecting their safety, there is an
increasing expectation that all workers should be individually responsible for their own
safety (Turner and Gray 2009). Safety authorities across Australia, for example,
encourage young workers to ask questions, request training, wear personal protective
equipment and to refuse unsafe work (for examples, see WHSQ 2012; Youth Safe 2010).
While this trend can be understood as a positive development which acknowledges the
agency of young workers, it also has the potential to construct these workers as being
individually ‘responsible’for workplace safety (Barneston and Foster 2012; Gray 2009;
Rasmussen 2011), while neglecting an emphasis on risk factors at the structural,
regulatory and workplace levels.
The responsibilisation of workplace safety
Encouraging individual workers to take responsibility for, and to respond to safety issues
is part of what Gray (2009, 326) refers to as the ‘responsibilization strategy of health and
safety’. Gray suggests that this shift has seen workers simultaneously redefined as both
potential safety victims as well as offenders and has seen a reframing of workplace safety
as the active and conscious choice of workers to not only practice safe behaviours but to
‘be’safe workers. In facilitating the transfer of a shared responsibility for safety outcomes
to an individual one, the process of responsibilisation has resulted in young workers
having to become responsible for the risks incurred by their choices. This has seen a large
component of the burden of risk moved from institutions to individuals and from
employers to employees.
Under the twin neoliberal processes of individualism and responsibilisation, the
young worker as the ideal industrial citizen (McDonald et al. 2014) must actively
monitor, regulate and manage their own health and safety both inside and outside the
workplace (Lewis 2006; Mascini, Achterberg, and Houtman 2013). However, while
young workers are encouraged to assume responsibility for changing their own and
other’s unsafe behaviours into safe ones through this process (Rasmussen 2011), the
responsibility for ensuring the safety of young workers has also been partially transferred
to parents. For example, parents are expected to encourage their teen ‘to point out any
OHS hazards they may identify while working, to know any emergency procedures
relevant to their job, [and] to find out who to speak to if they are injured at work or have
any safety concerns’(Youth Safe 2010, 2).
An important aspect of the shift to safety responsibilisation has been a focus on
providing practical information and training about safety matters which are targeted at
young workers to reduce the risk of workplace injury (e.g. Chin et al. 2010; Youth Safe
2010). However, school-aged workers in particular also need to develop the skills to
effectively communicate with co-workers and managers about work problems and
hazards in order to exercise their rights to a safe workplace (Linker et al. 2005). Self-
advocacy has been posited as a means for achieving these changes and providing a
framework to support improvements in young worker safety (Chin et al.2010). This is
because self-advocacy focuses on the ability of a young person to stand up for themselves
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based on both an understanding of their rights and the agency ‘to make choices about
[their] own life’(Pennell 2001, 223). However, it has been suggested that the
concentration of young workers in precarious employment and their tendency not to
report incidents and injuries, combined with poorly developed self-advocacy skills,
makes them a vulnerable part of the Australian workforce (Blewett et al. 2014).
Self-advocacy as a responsibilised safety strategy
Adopting a framework of increasing responsibilisation of workplace safety outcomes, this
paper reports on the ways in which school-aged workers understand and practice safety as
a workplace right and the implications for addressing their vulnerability and hazard
exposure in the workplace. Safety self-advocacy is used to offer insights into the
pressures on young workers to ‘be’safe workers and the extent to which they feel they
can practically influence workplace safety outcomes in different contexts.
The notion of self-advocacy has its origins in disabilities studies; however, the
conceptual framework for self-advocacy advanced by Test et al. (2005) can have broader
application. Within the workplace context, safety self-advocacy can be understood as the
ability of a worker to effectively communicate with co-workers and managers about work
problems and hazards and to actively and agentically pursue their rights to a safe
workplace. As shown in Figure 1, this framework positions knowledge of self and
knowledge of rights as the foundation, with communication and leadership skills being
keys to achieving effective self-advocacy.
Methods
This study focuses on young people in full-time education in Australia who are in the
formative stages of acquiring understandings of work and their place within it. The data
reported in this study were derived from a larger research project which investigated high
school students’understanding and experiences of paid work. In total, 48 group
interviews were conducted with 216 students at 16 government and three low-cost
Catholic high schools in metropolitan Brisbane, provincial cities and rural locales in
Queensland, Australia.
4
Figure 1. Components of safety self-advocacy (adapted from Test et al. 2005, 49).
Journal of Youth Studies 5
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Data gathering at each school was conducted during a single site visit pre-arranged to
minimise the impacts on individual schools. Small groups of students were invited to
participate in group interviews of between five and seven students that were stratified by
year level and gender. Group interviews as a method were favoured over individual
interviews in order to stimulate interaction amongst young people known to one another
and so that the experience of one student could be aligned, expanded or contrasted with
those of other students (Steyaert and Bouwen 2004). Interview questions covered several
major themes including where participants had learned about workforce participation;
previous employment experiences; perceived effects of employment quality and quantity
on study commitments; and employment-related goals and expectations. The analysis
here focuses on responses related to expectations and experiences of safety in the
workplace. Verbatim transcripts were manually coded according to Test et al.’s(2005)
conceptual framework for self-advocacy. In particular, we searched for evidence that
reflected how the young people in our sample understood and practiced workplace safety
rights and responsibilities; recognised, assessed and managed workplace hazards; and
exercised communication, negotiation and leadership skills in the context of their specific
workplaces. The analysis also took into account patterns in the data reflecting the nature
and extent of previous work experience of respondents.
The young people who participated in the group interviews included 117 year 9
students aged 13–14 years (27 group interviews) and 99 year 11 students aged 15–16
years (21 group interviews). Year 9 and year 11 students were sampled to contrast
knowledge and experiences of paid work among a young cohort who were less frequently
employed (35% of year 9 students had experienced paid employment) with a cohort who
were more like to have had experience of paid work (80% of year 11 students had
experienced paid employment). Participants were most commonly employed as sales
workers (e.g. fast food attendant, shop assistant) or labourers (e.g. food preparation, farm
workers). A sizeable minority of the older students reported that they were in formal
vocational programmes, which combine work placements with formal study –often, but
not always, within the school environment –to acquire vocational certificates. Fifty-one
per cent of the total sample were employed at the time of the research or had been
employed during the previous 12 months. While our analytic emphasis was primarily on
students who had participated in the formal labour market and who were in a position to
reflect on their safety experiences in actual workplaces, students who had not had direct
experience of paid work (many of whom had undertaken informal work such as in family
businesses or babysitting jobs and who clearly anticipated a paid job in their imminent
future), offered important insights about how safety knowledge and capacities emerge and
develop.
Results: practicing safety self-advocacy in Australian workplaces
The results are presented under four headings reflecting four self-advocacy themes
identified in the data: knowledge and practice of safety rights; knowledge of self;
communication; and leadership. Knowledge and the practice of safety rights
Effective self-advocacy is dependent on being aware of one’s rights, being able to
recognise if these rights have been violated, and being able to to find ways to redress
violations. Combined, these are broadly characterised within the self-advocacy literature
as a knowledge of rights (Test et al. 2005). Rights around workplace safety were
confidently listed off in the group interviews; students as young as 13 who had no prior
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work experience demonstrated a general understanding of workplace safety rights. Rights
to physical safety were especially well understood by the participants and some students
also recognised rights to psychological safety such as freedom from bullying and sexual
harassment from both co-workers and customers. However, while issues of lower-level
occupational violence in the form of verbal abuse from ‘rude customers’or co-workers
was frequently mentioned, this was typically viewed as inevitable, whereby the tolerance
of such behaviours was accepted as simply ‘part of the job’.
An important finding was that the right to a safe workplace was broadly understood
by the young worker participants within an advocacy context, in the sense that
respondents articulated the right to raise concerns with employers over unsafe work
conditions and acknowledged the employer’s corresponding responsibility to act upon
these concerns. This understanding was illustrated in a response by a young retail worker
who noted:
It should be a safe environment. If you mention something to stop hazards and make it better
for you, they should do it as soon as possible. (girl 15 years, retail worker)
Furthermore, while our participants recognised in the importance of following instruc-
tions from their manager or employer in terms of enhancing their ‘employability’, they
also confidently articulated their right to avoid or refuse to perform tasks they deemed to
be unsafe. Even those who had not previously held a paid job understood these rights to
either speak up or refuse to undertake unsafe work:
I think we should have the right to complain if something happens and just to stick up for
yourself if something is not right, you should have the right to say something. (girl 13 years,
not currently working)
You’ve got a right to refuse. If it is going to affect your health and safety, there’s no way you
are going to do it …Sorry but I’m not going to do that. (boy 14 years, not currently working)
These views could be understood as youthful idealism rather than reflective of workplace
reality. However, they also suggest that young people are socialised into accepting
responsibility for safety outcomes even before they enter the workforce.
In addition to an advocacy framing, safety was also characterised as being part of a
personal responsibility to ‘be’a safe worker and a component of self-care. A significant
dimension of the ability to self-advocate in order to be safe is dependent not only on the
ability of a young person to recognise and manage hazards, but also to demonstrate a high
degree of personal and situational self-awareness. This knowledge of self forms the
second foundation of self-advocacy.
Knowledge of self and the ability to recognise and manage hazards
Knowledge of self is primarily characterised within the self-advocacy literatue as
comprising an awareness of one’s own interests, preferences and strengths (Test et al.
2005). While fundamentally an assets –or strengths-based orientation, knowledge of self
also requires an honest appraisal of one’s weaknesses, skills levels and level of
experience. These capacities rest on being able to identify the risks associated with
undertaking a given task based on one’s level of competence and experience and to
manage associated hazards to minimse adverse safety outcomes and the occurance of
safety incidents.
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When discussing safety incidents, burns were the most common injury reported by
participants, followed by minor cuts and scratches and tripping or falling. A significant
proportion of participants also indicated that they had experienced occupational violence
in the form of verbal abuse or sexual harrassment from customers, managers or other staff
members. These experiences discussed by the young workers in our sample are consistent
with the broader literature citing reported injuries among young workers in Australia,
where minor burns and lacerations are common and occupational violence in the form of
verbal abuse from customers is very common (Mayhew 2000,2005). Young workers who
were employed in frontline customer service roles in particular frequently recounted
narratives related to incidents of customer-initiated sexual harassment and abuse.
The impact of knowledge of self on exercising self-advocacy can be strongly
influenced by expectations and understandings about what it means to be a ‘good’or
compliant worker, or how to behave in a workplace. This knowledge and understanding
of oneself as also being a ‘safe worker’is co-created through the training programmes
and promotional materials which enable these school-aged workers to be ‘aware of
themselves vis-à-vis preferred norms and ends’regarding safety and other employability
matters (Rasmussen 2011, 462). While the students here were generally aware that
employers had a responsibility ‘To keep you safe. They can’t make you do something
harmful’(boy 14 years, manual labourer), questions of young people’s agency also come
to the fore. As shown in the following exchange between an interviewer and group
interview participant, it is one matter to be able to identify potential hazards and to know
that you are not required to perform duties you think are unsafe, but another matter
entirely to speak up or refuse to perform certain tasks in a workplace where obediance
and compliance are valued traits.
Interviewer: What do you think are your responsibilities to the employer for paid work?
Respondent: To do what your employer asks you to do the first time.
Interviewer: Would there be any limitations to that?
Respondent: If it was something dangerous and it could harm someone.
Interviewer: What would you do then?
Respondent: I don’t know.
Interviewer: Are there any other responsibilities to your employer?
Respondent: Be safe. (boy 13 years, not currently working)
This exchange clearly demonstrates the tension between being a safe worker and being a
‘good’worker and the gap between a knowledge of rights of self and the ability to self-
advocate. The self-advocacy model posits the development of strong communication and
leadership skills as a way of addressing this gap.
Communication and the exercise of self-advocacy
Our research supports the idea that even with knowledge of rights and the ability to
identify and manage hazards, young workers may lack the self-confidence and
communication skills necessary to effectively question or convey concerns to their
supervisors (Linker et al. 2005). For this reason, it has been argued that the possession of
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good personal communication skills such as negotiation, persuasion and assertiveness is
vital in being able to effectively self-advocate (Test et al. 2005). Also critical, however, is
a workplace environment which supports young workers to communicate their concerns.
Safety self-advocacy is based on the ideal that raising concerns about workplace
safety in a constructive and respectful way is not only permissible and legitimate but is an
expected part of every employee’s role. Our participants reported being willing and
confident to self-advocate around operational concerns, such as receiving the correct level
of pay and negotiating for time off work, and they cited numerous scenarios where they
had done this successfully. With respect to safety, however, a striking and contrasting
finding was that very few young people were able to cite examples of times when they
had voiced a concern in the context of the workplace. Rather, despite claims of
confidence in their ability to refuse to undertake work they considered to be unsafe,
participants reported being relatively passive about workplace safety concerns.
Calls for increased safety self-advocacy and the responsibilisation approach to safety
are based on the expectation that employers and co-workers will listen to and take
seriously the concerns of young workers. Within these discourses, employers and co-
workers are cast as rational actors who share the ideals of self-advocacy and will be
receptive to hearing about and acting on the safety concerns of young workers (Tucker
and Turner 2013). In contrast to this assumption, the experience of young workers in this
and previous studies is that they may feel discredited or that their self-advocacy attempts
are delegitimised, when reporting safety concerns or even actual injuries (Chin et al.
2010; Tucker and Turner 2013).
Typically, students who participated in the group interviews who had encountered
problems with being verbally abused or sexually harassed by customers reported that they
believed management was supportive of them and generally willing intervene on their
behalf. This perception of management responsiveness within a workplace setting was
illustrated in a response by a young retail worker who noted:
At one stage there was a customer who always came in and he was writing me letters and
sending letters to my home address, and it was getting really out of hand. If he came into the
store, I had to call the managers and they wouldn't let him come in. If I was working, they
wouldn't let him in. (girl 16 years, retail worker)
However, when these same school-aged workers acted upon the expectation that had been
placed on them to voice their safety concerns about non-customer-related issues, a
number reported that their managers did not take their safety concerns seriously, even
following a workplace injury. In some cases, participants suggested that they felt that
their managers blamed them for their injury.
5
I grated myself, because you had to do vegies and stuff,and I grated myself and she said
‘Well that was stupid, why did you do that?’… Yeah, and there was blood everywhere, and
she said ‘Why did you do that?’I was like ‘Can I have a band-aid?’She got a band-aid and
then she didn't talk to me. (girl 14 years, food service worker)
Dominant discourses about youth, young workers and risk are closely related to
organisational processes of individualising and pathologising safety (Nielsen 2012).
When management discredits injury reports and delegitimises safety concerns, it can
discourage young workers from reporting further injuries and safety concerns and can
contribute to a culture in which injury is assumed and normalised (Chin et al. 2010).
Journal of Youth Studies 9
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Unfortunately, as Power and Baqee (2010) have noted the realities of the work context
and power relations between young employees and supervisors generally receive little
attention or acknowledgement in programmes designed to improve young worker safety.
In the research reported in this paper, the students demonstrated a nascent appreciation of
workplace power dynamics, its potential impact on their willingness or ability to report a
workplace incident, and the importance of employers providing an environment in which
staff could have faith that safety issues would be dealt with appropriately and in a timely
fashion.
You’ve got to make people comfortable enough, like if you get injured or a sexual
harassment suit or whatever, you do feel comfortable enough to go to someone in power and
say, ‘Hey, this happened, can we do something about it?’(girl 15 year, retail worker)
Leadership and self-advocacy
The final dimension of self-advocacy is leadership. Leadership can be understood as a
step beyond personal self-advocacy whereby an individual not only recognises the roles
of team members and has the capacity to function as a team member, but also has the
ability, willingness and confidence to speak up within or for that group (Test et al. 2005).
Although being a safe worker was commonly understood by the student workers as ‘just
being responsible for your own actions’(boy 15 year, not working), many of the research
participants, as the following excerpts illustrate, demonstrated maturity in their
understanding of the need to provide a safe work environment for others, including
customers and other staff members. This was in sharp contradistinction to the
stereotyipcal views about young workers often expressed by employers.
It is your responsibility to keep your area tidy for customers and yourself and other team
members and other risks and hazards that cause injury. (girl 15 years, retail worker)
You sometimes have to clean everything up if there is a spill so customers don’t get hurt.
(girl 16 years, retail worker)
They also demonstrated a willingness to encourage safe behaviours amongst their peers
and to speak up for others such as in instances of harassment.
[At work] you experience stuff, you meet new people, make new friends. [It’s about]
knowing how to act sometimes if your mates are being irresponsible. You have to be mature
when you go to work. (boy 15 years, retail worker)
Speak up and say, even if it isn’t you that is getting harrassed, just go to the employer and
say ‘Um, look, so and so is getting harassed by whoever it is.’(boy 16 years, apprentice
mechanic)
This discussion of young people’s views of safety at work provides some support for the
idea that self-advocacy, as a strategy for improving workplace safety outcomes, is reliant
on a young worker having the knowledge, skills, willingness and capacity to advocate for
their own interests. However, even when these conditions are met, safety self-advocacy
cannot be expected to replace the need for quality on-the-job training and supervision,
particularly for school-aged workers who may not have the benefit of previous
experiences in other workplaces to draw from (Tresize-Brown 2004). Because young
10 D. Grant-Smith and P. McDonald
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workers who attempt self-advocacy are generally dependent on adults, such as parents or
a responsive supervisor or co-worker, to support or facilitate the process at some point
(Grover 2005) expectations for safety self-advocacy needs to be understood and practiced
as both an individual and collective responsibility (Tucker and Turner 2013). They must
also beintegrated into a broader suite of safety interventions that adequately reflect the
role of the employer, the community and the government to provide a safe workplace,
particularly for our most vulnerable workers.
Study participants reflected this understanding that a safe workplace can only be
achieved through the combined efforts of staff and management.
I know we’ve got the right …to be safe. That is all done through training [and] having all
your managers and team members there for support. (girl 16 years, retail worker)
However, persistent, high injury rates reported in previous studies suggest that not all
workplaces will foster the safety culture necessary to value and act on the safety concerns
of school-aged workers. Hence, parents, schools, unions and advocacy groups must
continue to support young workers to develop the knowledge, communication and
leadership skills required to exercise their rights to a safe workplace.
Discussion: a critique of self-advocacy as a responsibilised safety strategy
We have argued in this article that while the notion of self-advocacy has sigificant
empowerment potential, it also poses risks in placing too great a burden on young
workers to be responsible for their own safety. Advising workers of their rights is
important, but an awareness of rights does not necessarily lead to action, particularly
when knowledge about how to enforce rights, or the capacity to do so, is low (Gray
2009; McDonald et al. 2014). While young workers have a right to raise safety
concerns and to refuse to undertake unsafe work, this expectation needs to be
understood in the context of the social, economic and pragmatic consequences that
may hinder a young worker’s ability to advocate for this right (Barton and Sutcliffe
2009; Chin et al. 2010).
The findings of this study show that sharing responsibility for workplace safety with
young workers does not mean equal responsibility and fostering self-advocacy does not
absolve others of their obligations for ensuring the safety of young workers.
Recognising the limits to self-advocacy
Calls for increased self-advocacy are a two-edged sword. On one hand, the promotion of
safety self-advocacy for young workers positively recognises them as responsible
workers and provides an avenue for them to exercise agency in the workplace. Safety
self-advocacy has the potential to challenge fatalistic views regarding injury prevention in
which young workers may perceive themselves to be powerless to effect changes that
might improve their workplace safety. On the other hand, however, the promotion of
safety self-advocacy can be blind to structural, political and social limitations, particularly
for more vulnerable workers, and may fail to recognise that the agency of young workers
is ‘bounded’in the sense that any number of barriers can limit the expression of agency
through what Evans (2002, 261) refers to as ‘the interfusion of agency and structural
influences’. Indeed, Nielsen et al. (2013) note that exposure to workplace risk is not
equally distributed among young workers and caution that an overemphasis on the
Journal of Youth Studies 11
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chronological age of workers runs the risk of overestimating the contribution of
individual characteristics such as awareness and cognitive limitations to young workers’
choices at the expense of adequate recognition of the structural, relational and hierarchical
dimensions at play.
Our study revealed several dimensions of bounded agency for young workers.
School-aged workers in particular often occupy a precarious and vulnerable position in
the labour market, occupying jobs which are characterised by low pay, insecurity and
unpredicatable hours. This vulnerability is associated with both the percieved and actual
precarity of their employment in terms of low pay and insecurity and unpredictability of
work hours, as well as lack of experience with negotiating employer–employee
relationships (Anderson, Hannif, and Lamm 2011) and the consequent power imbalances
they experience. These structural realities mean that in the context of everyday
workplaces, the ability of young workers to meaningfully affect safety outcomes is
likely to be constrained, regardless of their self-advocacy efforts. Our study also
demonstrated that while safety rights and safety self-advocacy were introduced with the
intention of protecting and empowering workers, ‘the workplace …is often poorly
equipped to distribute responsibility equally among all parties, given the hierarchy of
control under the employment contract’(Gray 2009, 329).
Self-advocacy is based on a set of skills and knowledge that are assumed can be
acquired. The data here showed that school-aged workers had substantially internalised
their individual responsibility for identifying, and responding accordingly, to situations
where safety was a risk or where injury had already occurred. Indeed, even younger
students in the sample who had never had a paid job, asserted that they would be
accountable for creating a safe workplace in anticipated future employment. As Gray
(2009, 329) notes, ideas of ‘rights’have increasingly become conflated with notions of
worker ‘responsibilities’.
Despite internalising safety self-advocacy as an integral part of what constituted being
a‘good worker’, it was clear from the data that many school-aged workers, depending on
the workplace and situational context, self-censored in situations of safety risk due to
their inexperience, newcomer status and a perceived powerlessness (Tucker and Turner
2013). This was evidenced by a general reluctance to speak up or to self-advocate, even
where injury had occurred. Indeed, when describing their workplace experiences, young
people appeared more likely to challenge objectively defined operational issues such as
pay or work hours, than more subjectively perceived issues related to safety. Failure to
exercise self-advocacy should not be seen as a failing by the young worker, particularly
because it is ‘asking students to move for a situation of high physical risk to one of high
social risk’(Chin et al. 2010, 578). Illustrative of this were scenarios described by several
students who recounted being ignored or blamed for safety breaches or injuries and a
subsequent undermining of their confidence that they were perceiving the risks
accurately.
Safety self-advocacy is focused on individual skills and knowledge but in real
workplaces, often relies on some form of adult intervention or voice for legitimacy and
impact. Examples of customer harassment and involving the manager are illustrative of
this and raise issues regarding the lack of other forms of legitimate adult or agency
advocacy, or resources such as trade unions and advisory services (Dear and
McDonald 2005).
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Conclusion: towards a more balanced approach to young worker safety
The importance of educating young workers about workplace safety and their right to
raise concerns about or to refuse to undertake potentially hazardous tasks is unquestioned.
However, calls for increased self-advocacy by school-aged workers must be supported by
initiatives to increase both their knowledge of their rights, and also their communication
and leadership skills so that they might effectively exercise these rights. Indeed,
developing the capacities necessary for effective safety self-advocacy could result in
the development of a range of skills that will serve young workers across their working
careers and in other aspects of their life to be confident citizens with a good
understanding of their rights and the skills to defend them. However, it is problematic
to expect that safety self-advocacy should be a primary response for ensuring safety in the
workplace.
Young workers should be supported to view self-advocacy as a process of holding the
employer responsible for their part in workplace safety. Rather than narrowly focusing on
the need to change young worker attitudes and behaviour, self-advocacy approaches must
be anchored within a suite of integrated interventions aimed at improving the workplace
safety of young workers which recognises the influence and interelationship of
individual, interpersonal, organisational, community and policy factors (Gallagher and
Rattigan 2013). Approaches to improving the workplace safety of young workers must
recognise the limitations that might affect their ability or willingness to self-advocate.
Calls for increased safety self-advocacy by young workers must consider the importance
and impact of a range of social and institutional factors including susceptibility to peer
pressure (Breslin and Smith 2013); their wish to appear competent and successful to
others and not to be viewed as victims (Grover 2005); and the delegitimation of their
safety concerns by supervisors (Chin et al. 2010). Furthermore, social marketing and
training programmes advocating self-advocacy should also acknowledge the potential
psychological and structural barriers and propose practical ways of dealing with safety
concerns, given these realities (Tucker and Turner 2013).
A form of self-advocacy which encourages young workers to promote safety rights
while recognising the political and social consequences of such advocacy is required
(Chin et al. 2010). Such an approach could provide the resources for young people to
become agentic in responding to workplace risk by publicly articulating and acting on
their rights. It would also be sensitive to the structural and developmental concerns that
might affect the ability or willingness of school-aged workers to self-advocate for a safe
workplace.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
The research reported in this paper was funded through the Australian Research Council’s Linkage
Project funding scheme [project number LP0774931] and Australian Research Council Future
Fellowship [project number FT120100635].
Journal of Youth Studies 13
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Notes
1. Young workers, aged 15–24 years, constitute 17% of the Australia workforce (ABS 2007). It has
been estimated that 44% of 15- to 19-year-olds (Muir et al. 2009, 13) and 11% of 10- to 14-year-
olds (ABS 2006, 3) participate in paid employment.
2. These findings are consistent with other industrialised nations (e.g. see Laberge and
Ledoux 2011).
3. Precarious employment, including casual workers, involves work with no employment security
(Mayhew and Quinlan 2002).
4. Field work for the broader study included surveys with students from the same 19 high schools.
The surveys explored current working hours and conditions, work-study balance and knowledge
of employment entitlements. The broader study also involved interviews with teachers,
employers (of young workers), union officials, community organisation representatives and
policy officials. Students also completed a short essay on their future aspirations for education
work, family and leisure. Consistent with ethical requirements only students with a signed
parental consent form were permitted to participate in the research.
5. The social dynamics of small and family businesses also affects the ability of young workers to
self-advocate. In small family businesses, because the owners are often family members or
friends of the family, it can be more difficult to raise issues than may be the case in a larger
organisation where there are multiple managers and levels of management to receive a complaint
(Anderson, Hannif, and Lamm 2011). This is evident in the account of a participant who was
midly electrocuted while working in the bakery run by his father: ‘I got shocked.Not too badly, it
was just a shock …I told Dad and he asked me how it happened and I showed him and he said,
“Don’t do that again”’. (boy 14 years, food service worker)
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