What Your Teen Can Do If a Job Feels Unsafe

Your teenager has come home and told you something that made your stomach drop. Before anything else: the advice you will find on most pages, that they can simply refuse unsafe work, is not accurate, and acting on it can leave a 17 year old standing on a job site in an argument they cannot win. Here is the real standard, and then the things that actually help.

What is the legal right to refuse, exactly?

OSHA sets it out on its own right to refuse page, under 29 CFR 1977.12(b)(2), and the wording is deliberately tight. A worker may have a legal right to refuse only where all of the following are true.

• "Where possible, you have asked the employer to eliminate the danger, and the employer failed to do so."
• "You refused to work in 'good faith.' This means that you must genuinely believe that an imminent danger exists."
• "A reasonable person would agree that there is a real danger of death or serious injury."
• "There isn't enough time, due to the urgency of the hazard, to get it corrected through regular enforcement channels."

Read those four again with a teenager in mind. The test is not “this feels unsafe.” It is not “I have not been trained on this.” It is imminent danger of death or serious physical harm, with no time to get it fixed any other way, after the employer has already been asked and has already refused. Even then, OSHA’s own careful phrasing is that the worker may have a legal right.

This is a last resort, and it is written like one. It is worth your teenager knowing it exists. It is not worth them planning around it.

Is this an overreaction on my part?

No. In 2024, BLS recorded 5,070 fatal work injuries nationally, a rate of 3.3 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, with 1,032 of those deaths in construction and extraction occupations. Falls, slips and trips accounted for 370 of the construction and extraction deaths that year, down from 400 in 2023.

Those are not numbers about carelessness. Trench walls, energised conductors, confined spaces and falls from height are hazards built into the work itself, which is why they are regulated as categories rather than left to individual judgment. Your instinct to take this seriously is correct. The question is only what to do with it.

What actually helps, in order

1. Ask what the task requires, not whether it is safe. “Safe” is an argument. “What PPE goes with this one, and have I had the training for it?” is a question, and it usually gets a real answer. If the answer is that there is no training and no equipment, your teenager now knows something concrete and has not accused anyone of anything.

Protective equipment rules are often extremely specific, which is what makes this question useful. In power line work, for example, 29 CFR 1910.269(l)(8) requires employees exposed to an electric arc to wear arc-rated clothing with a rating of at least 1 calorie per square centimetre, and separately prohibits clothing made of materials such as acetate, nylon, polyester or rayon that readily melt, ignite or scorch. That standard governs line work rather than ordinary construction electrical work, but the principle carries: a polyester hoodie is not a style choice near an arc hazard, it is a regulated hazard, because it melts onto skin.

2. Get the concern out of the moment. Ending the shift, going home and talking it through with you is nearly always better than resolving it on site. Nothing about the four-part test above gets stronger by being argued with a foreman at 4 p.m.

3. Write down what happened while it is fresh. Date, time, what was asked, who asked, who else was there, what equipment was or was not available. This costs nothing and is the difference between a complaint that goes somewhere and one that does not.

4. Then let an adult make the call. The next two sections are yours to do, not theirs.

How do we file a complaint, and can we stay anonymous?

You can. OSHA takes complaints online, by phone or by letter, in any language, and states that you may file anonymously. The phone route is your local OSHA office or 800-321-6742.

There is a genuine trade-off and you should know it before choosing. OSHA states that a signed complaint is more likely to result in an onsite inspection. Anonymity protects your teenager’s name and costs you the inspection that would actually change the site. Which way that cuts depends on how identifiable the complaint is anyway, and on whether they intend to keep the job.

Keep two things separate. A safety complaint is one filing. A retaliation complaint, if someone is fired or punished for raising a safety issue, is a different filing with a short and variable deadline: OSHA states it is 30 to 180 days depending on the statute. Missing that window is not recoverable, so if that is your situation, treat it as a this-week problem.

If the issue is age or hours rather than a hazard, that is the Wage and Hour Division instead, and DOL says child labor complaints are free and confidential. Work out which one you have. A 17 year old being sent up a ladder to a roof is a child labor question before it is a safety question, and can a 17 year old work on a roof explains why.

When do I call the state labor department?

Sooner than you think. States enforce their own child labor rules, often stricter than the federal ones, and the state office is usually faster to reach than a federal one. DOL publishes a state labor offices contact list with phone numbers for every state, the District of Columbia and the territories.

Call them when the work looks like it might be on the hazardous occupations list, when hours look wrong, when a required certificate has been skipped, or when you simply cannot tell. If there is an injury, a firing, or real money involved, that is also the point to talk to a lawyer. This page is general information, not legal advice.

What this looks like

Desmond is 17 and three weeks into a summer job with a small property maintenance outfit. On a Thursday the crew lead points at a ladder and tells him to go up and clear the gutters on a two-storey house.

He does not argue and he does not climb. He says he has not been trained on ladder work and asks what he should pick up instead, and the crew lead, mildly annoyed, puts him on the hedges. That evening he tells his mother, who reads the roofing order and finds that gutter and downspout work is named in it, and that Desmond is not a registered apprentice or a student-learner.

She calls the state labor department the next morning, and files an OSHA complaint about the ladder practice she has now heard described twice. She does not name Desmond in it. He finishes the week, and then, because nothing about the way that crew works has changed and he is not going to change it, he gives notice and takes a job at a landscape supply yard for slightly less money.

That last part is the honest ending. This example is illustrative, but the outcome is the common one, and it is worth saying out loud rather than pretending every story ends with a corrected employer.

The part nobody wants to say

A teenager has very little leverage with a bad employer. They cannot negotiate, they usually cannot afford a lawyer, and the enforcement routes that do exist run on weeks and months, not shifts. Sometimes the correct answer really is to finish the week, file the complaint, and go work somewhere else, and there is nothing weak about that. A good employer in the trades is not rare, and the one that hands a 17 year old a ladder and walks away is telling you what the rest of the apprenticeship there would look like.

If you are trying to work out whether a specific task is allowed at all, start with what your teen can legally do at work or what power tools a 16 year old can legally use.