Youngsters who are working hard to earn a little extra cash are being given a safety boost this week.
Employers are being urged to get involved in efforts to ensure that the young people they employ in jobs such as paper rounds are safe and secure in their work.
And Swansea Council is calling on shopkeepers who employ paper boys and girls to make sure the equipment youngsters use is safe and that they give them proper training.
The initiative is all part of Child Employment Fortnight which aims to raise the importance of ensuring young people in work are properly protected.
John Austin, Child Employment Officer at Swansea Council, said: “We are trying to encourage employers in our area to provide better safety equipment and supply proper training and safe systems of working – for example a return bag system at the end of the newspaper round.
“We’d also like them to make proper risk assessments and share them with the child and parents and to take responsibility for checking the bicycles are safe as well as promoting the wearing of cycle helmets.”
In Swansea, young people between the ages of 13 and 16 are protected by a permit system for part-time work which parents, carers and employers need to be aware of.
Work which children who are still at school are not allowed to carry out – paid or unpaid – includes selling or delivering alcohol except in sealed containers and collecting or sorting refuse.
Mr Austin said there is more information about the kind of work that children and young people of school age can and can’t do as well as the number of hours they are legally allowed to work on the Council’s website.
Log onto www.swansea.gov.uk/education and scroll down the page to Child Employment.
