Worker’s Rights. What does that mean to you? I hadn’t really thought about worker rights in the past as I, well, didn’t have a job. This year, my interest in worker’s rights has skyrocketed mainly for one reason. My age…

At the time that I am writing this post, I’ll be fifteen years old. Being fifteen years old means a few things but I’m only going to be talking about one of those things in this post… Being fifteen means I can finally get a job! Although that may not be exciting for many teenagers who have other things to do, I like the prospect of getting paid for doing something like teaching little kids to snowboard. That’s my opinion at least.

Anyways, as we are a class mainly filled with fifteen year olds, our teachers took up the responsibility to teach us our rights as young employees and how to stay safe in the workplace. I was expecting that we were going to essentially be learning common sense. After all, what’s the worst that could happen at my job? That was probably a bad assumption on my part…

The unit itself on workplace safety was relatively brief, but we learned a lot in the few classes we had for it. We started off by taking an introductory quiz about the basics of workplace safety and the experiences some of us had in a workplace (good or bad.) All in all, it was pretty basic and gave me a good idea where the unit would be going in terms of how we would stay safe as employees. Here’s what the quiz looked like…

After the quiz, we were told to watch a video called, “Lost Youth.”

The tone of the whole unit went from pretty normal to pretty dark within the first few minutes of all of us watching the video. If you want to watch the video for yourself, you can find it in the link above, I should say a Viewer Discretion is Advised warning because the video recreates some of the accidents that happened to the people in the video. It gets pretty bloody, so you have been warned. For those of you who maybe aren’t trying to traumatized themselves from ever working again, I’ll give a quick summary about the video.

It starts off by introducing several young adults who suffered very serious injuries while they were working. Lots of the injuries involved losing body parts of even worse—in my opinion— paralysis. The cause of the injuries had several factors including but not limited to; lack of common sense, being too tired to think straight, lack of training and supervision, etc. Being an active person like myself, my worst nightmare would be experiencing one of those injuries as I wouldn’t be able to do many of the things I love. This video, of course, scared me enough to really want to learn about workplace safety and knowing my rights so I know when I can refuse work.

We talked a little bit about the video and what we could do to avoid following the paths of those unfortunate people. The list of what we should avoid doing kind of falls into the place of common sense. Where things start to get more complicated is when work codes come into play. Moving on from how to avoid workplace accidents, which is mainly common sense, work regulations focus more on the specifics of the rules and what our rights are as workers.
To get more accustomed with the rules and knowing when to stand up for ourselves at work, we did another test of sorts to see if we could find conduct codes for certain rules. Here’s what that looked like…

To go along with this test, Aiden and I made a short advertisement  about knowing your rights as a worker, or more specifically, the dangers of NOT knowing your rights as a worker and the importance of understanding your rights.

Although I don’t have a job yet, I’m definitely going to be using the information given to us in this unit to its full potential. I want to make sure that I’m going to have fair treatment and know how to avoid potentially dangerous accidents. After all, I don’t want to lose my youth all because of a job. I’m glad that we were able to take some time out of our usual routine for school to talk about workplace safety (whether it’s mandatory or not.)

Who knows? Maybe within the next few posts, I’ll be working!