Work Smart, Work Safe

(Originally appeared in the Albany, NY Times Union)

Take a look in the mirror.

Do you like what you see, more or less? Then count your blessings. When Ben Nomine looks in the mirror, what he sees are scars.

Ben was a top student at South-west Oswego Christian High School in western New York State, and goalie for the school soccer team. Afternoons and weekends, he was working for his father’s company. It wasn’t much of a job, but it gave him spending money - a lot of money for a 15-year-old. He would take used propane cylinders, clean them up, and slap a new sticker on them so they could be refilled.

Things were going fine until one day when he started in on a tank that seemed empty, but wasn’t. When he popped the seal, a cloud of propane whooshed out of the container, burning his face. He was running for the door when the expanding cloud met the pilot light in the shop’s furnace. It blew him out of the building, his clothes in flames. He ended up with burns over 30 to 40 percent of his body.

Summer jobs, and after-school jobs, can be great. Bringing in $50, $80, $200 a week can really do wonders for your lifestyle.

But it’s important to remember as you flip those burgers or deliver those pizzas that they can have a really ugly impact on your lifestyle, too. More than 100,000 teenagers are injured on the job every year in this country, which means you have a pretty good chance of getting hurt, if you don’t work smart. And this isn’t like blowing a test, where you can always study hard to pull your average back up. Scar tissue doesn’t go away, and some injuries are forever.

Michael Lorenzo wanted to be a drummer. He used to spend hours down in his basement in Newark, bashing away to his favorite records. He was going to be in a band when he got older - he was just 15.

He got a summer job with a company that salvaged car parts and scrap metal - one of the great natural resources of New Jersey. He got paid in cash, under the table - more money for him. He had only been on the job three weeks the day he was feeding metal into the crusher, and slipped.

He was lucky. It didn’t take off his arm, it just tore a bite out of his wrist - severing the nerves, ligaments, and muscles of his hand. Surgery managed to put things back together again, although his hand is still pretty numb, and isn’t much good for anything complicated. Of course, it’s completely useless for drumming. And it will never get better.

The sad part is, neither one of those accidents should have taken place. It is illegal for kids under 16 to operate heavy or dangerous machinery - like that metal crusher - or work around explosives, like propane gas.

There’s a good reason for that. Teenage workers often end up “filling in gaps”, helping out here or there, depending on what needs to get done. Nobody sits you down and takes an hour to explain how the machine operates; they just grab you and say, “Go take care of that, then come back.” That’s a recipe for tragedy.

Kids aren’t supposed to operate power-slicers. But Matthew Fallon’s boss told him to just turn on a meat slicer and wipe down the spinning blade with a rag. When it sliced open his finger, the bone splintered. He was 15.

The reality is, the workplace can be a lot more dangerous than most people think. When you think “dangerous,” you probably get a picture of a kid in a coal mine, or cutting down trees with a chainsaw. But the fact is, three of the most dangerous workplace environments are: department stores, eating and drinking establishments, and retail grocery stores.

A 13-year-old boy was working at a Bronx supermarket. Trash compactors are incredibly dangerous; these are huge, spring-loaded machines that frequently jam up. Hundreds of people are injured in them every year, and kids aren’t supposed to work on them under any circumstance. But he was assigned to stuff some boxes in the machine. He got caught and dragged inside. One arm was severed, the other broken, and his chest was crushed. His father, who managed the supermarket, rushed him to Lincoln hospital. But he was already dead.

Even when your boss cares about you, bad things can happen. But on most jobs, your boss is not your friend – he’s just your boss. The company is in business to make money, and there’s always pressure from higher up to cut costs and produce more, rest less and hustle more.

Domino’s used to guarantee pizza delivery: 30 minutes, or the customer gets $3 off. Usually, the money came out of the driver’s paycheck, an incentive for them to get there fast. Jesse Colson was 17 when he got a job driving for Domino’s in Mooresville, Indiana - illegally, since you can’t drive for a business until you’re 18.

Although the company says it never encouraged fast or unsafe driving, he knew that hustling that pizza out to the customer was the only thing that counted. The manager would hand out “King of Lates” badges to drivers who missed the deadline. The longer Jesse worked there, the tenser he got. It was really getting to him.

He had found a new job, and was putting in one last weekend for Domino’s, when he lost control of his car getting that terribly important pizza out to the customer. He died instantly when his car hit a telephone poll.

When Jesse’s mother drove by the shop the following week, she saw a sign in the window advertising for a replacement driver. The requirement of 18 years old had been scratched out, and “16 or 17” written over. She was so outraged she started an organization, People Against Dangerous Deliveries, that ultimately ended the Domino’s 30-minute delivery.

Another place that just didn’t seem interested in playing fair was Burger King. There was a period in the ‘80s when the folks down at the Labor Department got quite a laugh out of the Burger King slogan: “Sometimes you’ve just got to break the rules.” But after slapping the Pillsbury-owned hamburger chain with a whopping $318,000 fine, the company stopped making kids work long - illegal - hours.

Hours are a problem. You want to work as many hours as you can, right? You took the job to earn money.

But federal law is pretty strict on this: during summers, 14 and 15-year-olds can’t work later than 9 p.m., and no more than 8 hours a day or 40 hours a week. During the school year, it’s even stricter: no more than 3 hours a day on a school night, 18 hours a week total, and no later than 7 p.m. on school nights. (For 16-17 year olds, the situation is looser - check you local state labor department.)

So your boss lets you work the midnight shift, and you think that’s great. But think about it. If your boss is blowing off the law on this one, what other corners are getting cut? You’re better off playing it straight. After all, if you’re already breaking the rules, and the boss asks you to start doing something really dangerous, what are you going to say?

If you find yourself being asked to violate the Child Labor Laws, the first thing you should do is speak up. Say you don’t feel right about breaking the law.

“I think the big thing you should understand is, it is okay to tell the boss you can’t do certain things,” says Bill Traynor of the American Youth Work Center, a group that works to improve workplace safety for kids. “That’s hard, I know. But the power relationship is not as vast you might think it is. Teenagers in their first job often perceive the boss as this all-powerful figure. He’s not.”

If your boss still insists, you have a couple of options: You can refuse, and risk being fired. You can simply quit. If you decide your job is worth the risk, talk to some of your fellow employees. Let them know you are doing this, and it’s wrong. See if you can get one of them to help you - that alone can make all the difference. If the boss is being a jerk, most of them will know it, too, and be happy to help out.

And as soon as you can, call you local office of the Labor Department - look in the blue, government pages of the phone book. Tell them it’s a child labor issue - those get top priority, and someone will come faster. They won’t tell your boss who called - it’s illegal for the company to retaliate, anyway, but in the real world that does happen (in fact, that’s another good reason for talking to the other workers; if everyone in the shop knows there’s a problem, then anyone might have made the call). Being given a warning is enough to make most bosses do the right thing.

You don’t want to squeal on the boss? Think about it.

“Do you think,” says Traynor, “that if the boss caught you taking money from the cash register, they would think twice about calling the cops on you? Calling the Labor Department isn’t squealing; it’s protecting your rights - and maybe your life.”

And don’t figure, “I won’t say anything; I’ll just keep working for a while and when an inspector comes, the government will make my boss stop.” The sad truth is, the government has only 800 inspectors to cover millions of work-sites in all 50 states. In too many cases, the only way they can find out about abuses is when someone ends up in the hospital. Then they can step in and issue a fine, but it’s too late.

Like the case of Mr. B’s Supermarket in Valadosta Georgia. They were slapped with a hefty fine - $10,000 - when an 11-year-old employee (working under the table for below minimum wage) had his arm severed at the elbow while he was operating a meat grinder.

Mr. B’s blew it several different ways. It’s illegal to employ a kid under 14; it’s illegal for a kid under 18 to work dangerous machinery. But the kid was in no position to complain: he was working under the table, right? If he had gone to the Labor Department, he would have lost his job. So he kept working - and lost his arm instead.

Sometimes your boss just won’t seem to care at all. Knowing that you’re “just a kid,” counting on your being afraid to complain, not knowing what your rights are.

Michelle Vanagel worked at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Londonderry, New Hampshire. She was 15. One morning she burned herself baking muffins. In pain, she continued working. Her boss would have kept her there, baking muffins - but Michelle’s mother happened to stop by the store, and got her to the hospital in time. As it was, the burn became infected.

Knowing your rights can be the difference between life and death. On a construction site, teenagers are not allowed to work on roofs, in excavations, or with hoisting equipment or other heavy machinery. It may not seem like a big deal when the boss tells you to carry some tar paper up on the roof, and for the boss it isn’t. In one labor department case, a company was fined all of $280 for having a 15-year-old working on a roof.

But it was a big deal for the kid. He died when he broke through a skylight opening that was hidden under paper and fell 25 feet.

Sidebar:
The National Child Labor Coalition offers the following tips for working smart and working safe:

1) Don’t assume a workplace is safe.
2) Avoid under-the-table employment
3) Know your rights under the child labor laws
4) Ask questions of your employer - even if you think you can trust them
5) Pay attention to what’s happening around you
6) If you see something dangerous, call the Labor Department