Kids on forklifts? Stop it!

I was listening to my favorite rush hour FM morning team while commuting from kitchen to home office when something I heard stopped me in my tracks. Luckily no one was following close behind or there would have been a major cereal spill. The morning show host was talking about forklifts. Specifically, he was citing a report from the National Consumers League that “forklift operator” was number three on the list of five most dangerous jobs for teen workers.

Wait a minute. Isn’t it illegal for young teens to operate forklifts? It is, according to the Dept. of Labor. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. You know what they say about good intentions paving the road to hell. In my last blog I wrote about a very well intentioned effort called the Voluntary Protection Program. This is where companies promise to cooperate with OSHA to improve their safety. In return they avoid the burden of routine inspections. All they have to do is demonstrate that they have an exemplary safety and health program, have no ongoing health and safety enforcement actions, and have an injury and illness rate below the average rates for the industry.

Well, not every company that signed up for the VPP lived up to those good intentions. Some even reported fatalities yet stayed in the program. OSHA got hell from the General Accounting Office for not monitoring this program better, and recently the GAO came up with recommendations to salvage it.

My point in referring back to the VPP is to appeal to you parents with young teens who have summer jobs. This is not meant as a hysterical rant. It’s just a reminder that while OSHA has a duty to police workplace safety, they can’t stop bad things from happening. They can only try to prevent things from happening again. Unfortunately, we’ll continue to see yearly death tolls.

In the case of working teens, according to the most recent National Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (2007), a worker under 18 dies every ten days. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimates that 158,000 youths sustain work-related injuries and illnesses each year.

It is the responsibility of employers and parents to minimize these statistics. Most of you reading this are probably parents and you understand better than anyone how dangerous forklifts can be in the wrong operator’s hands. What’s crazy to me is not only that forklifts are number THREE on the list of the five most dangerous jobs for young workers, but that they’re on it at all. If many of these young people are not even supposed to be at the controls of a forklift in the first place, it’s obvious that employers and parents need to do a better job of policing its VIPs, just as OSHA is working to salvage its VPP.

Tell me if you’ve had personal experience with any of the above statistics. If we can put some anecdotal information behind those numbers maybe we can go viral with our message.

Tom Andel

Tandel4315@aol.com