Complaints about working conditions for minors doubled between 2014 and 2022, but one expert believes this may just be the tip of the iceberg.
Liz Giordano / CascadePBS.org / August 8, 2024
Jasmine Brennan has started her first job. A few months after turning 16, like many working high school students, Brennan found a food service job taking orders behind the counter at a Jack in the Box in Ferndale.
Brennan said her boss was rarely home and never provided her with any formal training, instead relying on friends for guidance.
“I was so lost. I had no idea. But it was fun, because obviously I’m a kid and I wasn’t really working, but I was enjoying being working,” Brennan told Cascade PBS.
Brennan’s bosses then made her work the night before classes or required her to work during school hours, all of which were later determined to be violations of the state’s youth labor law. While Brennan didn’t mind closing the restaurant late at night, working late meant less sleep if she had to be in school by 7:45 a.m. the next day.
“I would get angry and frustrated if I had to be at the store later than 12:30,” she said. “I have work to do tomorrow. If the store doesn’t open tomorrow, I have to go to school.”
“Their parents always made them work late on Sundays, sometimes into the early hours of the morning,” their mother, Lindsay Brennan, added. “I think that caused a bit of a disruption in school because they were exhausted.”
Youth employment in Washington state has increased over the past decade, and so have youth labor law charges. Teens are overworked and forced to stay late on school days. Some are forced to do dangerous or prohibited work. According to the Washington State Department of Labor and Industry, the state agency that monitors working conditions, 750 workers under the age of 18 reported workplace injuries in the state last year.
Many of these young workers serve food from behind the counter or scan items in the checkout line — some even harvest fruit and vegetables in the fields — and most are eager to please or afraid to be accused of inexperience.
Brennan said she would text her boss when she had plans during unauthorised hours.
When nothing changed, she eventually filed a complaint with L&I. During the three-month investigation period, the agency This Jack in the Box The facility in northwestern California violated juvenile labor laws 149 times by making minors work long hours in one day, late into the night on school days and without adult supervision.
Brennan only knew the company was violating labor laws because her father, who worked in construction, knew a lot about them.
After five months, Brennan’s parents forced her to quit the store: her father worked the night shift and kept watch from the parking lot for hours while Brennan and another 16-year-old friend served the last customers and closed the store without adult supervision, as required by law.
Jack in the Box in Ferndale, Washington, on August 1, 2024. (Liz Giordano/Cascade PBS)
“[Her boss] “Our daughters had no idea what they could or couldn’t do,” Lindsay Brennan said. “If they hadn’t complained to us, they would have continued to be abused.”
A growing workforce
In Washington state, employment for 16- to 19-year-olds has grown 46% over the past decade, and by 2023, 137,000 Washingtonians will be employed, about one-third of that age group, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Reed Maki, Director and Coordinator for Child Labor Issues, Child Labor Coalitionsaid a tight labor market likely motivates companies to hire minors.
“Teenagers tend to work for slightly lower wages,” Maki noted.
State laws regulate How many hours 14-17 year olds can work on school days, how many hours they can work on school nights, and what jobs or tasks they are prohibited from doing, such as digging on a job site, roofing, or operating a meat slicer. (In agricultural work, even 12 year olds can pick vegetables and fruit when school is out.)
Maki says young workers are in a more vulnerable position than adults because they are too eager to please and their developing brains limit their ability to assess risk.
“Because of their life experiences, they have no concept of what could go wrong,” he added.
L&I records show the number of complaints the department investigates each year more than doubled between 2014 and 2022, with a similar increase in the number of citations issued each year during that same period.
“Because we’re a complaint-driven process, it’s fair to say we have more people watching,” L&I spokesman Matthew Elrich said, “and that may be why we’re seeing more complaints leading to investigations.”
A Cascade PBS analysis of L&I data from 2014 to 2022 found that nearly all child labor complaints to L&I led to indictments. L&I conducted a survey The department handled 122 complaints and issued tickets in 119 cases, many of which were for multiple violations. Most of the violations also carried fines.
Maki said the survey’s findings suggest that the high rate of tickets issued suggests many unrecognized violations may go unreported.
“The number of violations we’re seeing is alarming, but it’s only a small part of it,” Maki said. “I think there’s a huge number of violations out there.”
According to the data, more than a third of the violations were for minors working late on school nights or long hours when they were supposed to be at school. The second most common category of violations (17%) was for workers not taking meal or rest breaks. Violations for performing prohibited work ranked fourth on the list of most common violations. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/fwRZa/1/
Jack in the Box was the recipient of the most significant citations from L&I for violating youth labor laws over the past decade. The $69,500 fine imposed in 2020 was one of at least 18 fines issued to Jack in the Box franchisees during that same period, totaling nearly $200,000.
L&I fined Brennan’s in Ferndale $12,450. The agency rated the company at 146. There were 48 counts of having four minors work during school hours, 39 counts of having six minors work beyond the hours allowed on the school day, and 48 counts of having three minors work without adult supervision after 8 p.m.
Multiple calls, emails and text messages to Perth Group, which operates Jack in the Box stores in the state, including the Ferndale store, were not responded to.
Nearly half of all state labor complaints against young workers in the past decade have been directed at the food service industry, which files more damage claims than any other industry among minors, according to L&I data.
An L&I study from the early 1990s found that younger workers were nearly twice as likely to be injured at work as older workers. Using census data and adjusting for the number of hours worked, researchers calculated that the injury rate for 16- and 17-year-olds was 19.4 per 100 employees and for adults was 10.6 per 100.
Twice as likely to get injured
According to L&I workers’ compensation data, 100 minors died after being injured at work in 2019. Last year, a 16-year-old boy lost both legs while operating machinery that’s on the prohibited use list for minors. In 2023, L&I reported that minor workers suffered 245 broken bones, 225 concussions and numerous cuts and sprains.
Matt Pomerinke said he was working his first job at a paper mill after graduating from high school when he was pulled into a machine and lost most of his right arm at age 21.
“It was just luck. That was all of our safety measures,” Pomerinke told an auditorium filled with teenage boys in hoodies and baseball caps two decades later.
Mr Pomerinke was speaking at the Newmarket Skills Centre in Tumwater. L&I’s Speaking Program for Injured Young WorkersIt’s a workplace safety awareness campaign that will take place just a few weeks before the end of the school year.
In the short time she’s been working at the factory, Pomerinke has seen a succession of colleagues suffer injuries: broken fingers and wrists, pulled muscles and torn shoulder blades.
He told the audience he received very little training in his first job: a 10-minute tour of a sawmill, followed by five minutes of instruction on how to pull planks off a conveyor belt and stack them, he recalled.
“Nobody taught me anything there. Nobody showed me anything,” Pomerinke said. “There was nobody I could ask questions to. I don’t think I had a career at that point. I just wanted to do everything myself.”
One night, when a stick got stuck in the sawdust conveyor, Pomerinke reached down to remove it, as he has done hundreds of times before.
“After two years, my luck ran out,” he says. “I was hurt worse than anyone else.”
It took paramedics 45 minutes to extricate him from the machine.
Before the school bell rang, Pomerinke offered some parting advice.
“Don’t take shortcuts. … It’s not worth it,” he said. “Get all the training you can and take it seriously.”
And learn your rights and responsibilities as a worker.
“What an employer can or can’t ask of you,” he said, pointing to his missing right forearm and right hand, “I didn’t realize that it ended up leading to this.”
Featured image: Former Jack in the Box employee Jasmine Brennan at one of the franchise locations in Washington. (Liz Giordano/Cascade PBS)
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