EDMONTON - Young people are the most accident-prone employees on Canadian job sites and must be more closely supervised if companies hope to reduce the disturbing number of injuries they suffer at work.
And experts say governments must do more to enforce safety laws and ensure that employers are properly training recruits if young workers are to avoid becoming statistics.
More than 50,700 workers under the age of 24 lost time from work after being injured on the job in 2006, according to the Association of Workers' Compensation Boards of Canada. Another 51 died on the job.
The real injury numbers are higher because many mishaps go unreported, says Dr. Louis Francescutti, a veteran emergency room physician who teaches at the University of Alberta.
"I can tell you there are hundreds of thousands of injuries that are occurring across the country that don't make the media simply because they aren't spectacular enough," Francescutti says.
"Yet kids are losing arms and legs and being paralyzed and severely burned as a result of workplace mishaps."
He adds that while this is not acceptable, it is tolerated.
"If that many young people came down with meningitis in one year, you could rest assured we would be doing something about it. We have a crisis in this country when it comes to injuries."
In Alberta, where the economy is booming, young people make up 17 per cent of the work force. But they accounted for almost one-quarter of disabled injury claims in 2006.
Workers in the province under the age 25 are 33 per cent more likely to be injured on the job than older workers.
A recent incident involved Mitchell Tanner, a 16-year-old part-time Rona employee who died near Edmonton after a forklift he was riding on flipped over and crushed him.
Saskatchewan and other provinces with resource and agricultural-based economies also have high injury rates for young workers. British Columbia is in the middle of the pack, according to figures compiled by the Institute for Work and Health, while Ontario has the lowest numbers.
Why are so many young people being injured or killed at work?
Experts point to a number of factors.
Newly hired young people don't have much previous job experience, are often eager to please and are reluctant to ask lots of questions of their employers about safety concerns, says Francescutti.
They also think differently than older people. "They are not thinking consequences," he says. "That's why young men make great soldiers. They have no fear."
He advises that employers watch young workers carefully.
"When you ask them, 'What were you thinking when you were riding on the side of that forklift' - they will probably say to you - 'I don't know.' And the answer is pretty honest. They weren't thinking."
The Institute for Work and Health found that only about one in five employees in Canada receive safety training during their first year with a new employer.
Those who did get training tended to be women in medium-sized workplaces and men in large workplaces. Young workers in jobs with higher physical demands and with a greater risk of injury were not more likely to receive safety training.
"The results suggest that provincial mandates to provide safety training to new employees do not guarantee that this training will happen, even in high-risk groups," researchers reported last year in the journal Injury Prevention.
