Young people, and beginners in general, are particularly exposed to the risk of serious and fatal injuries in their workplaces: this was the conclusion of the last national plan for the prevention of workplace accidents, in 2022, which made it a priority concern. Faced with this issue, Corinne Gaudart, research director at the CNRS, ergonomist and co-author of the work Rushed work (Les Petits Matins, 2023), highlights the importance of intergenerational transmission within work collectives.
What factors explain why younger people are very exposed to the risk of pain or accidents at work?
Their lack of experience is a crucial factor. The youngest are less experienced in what we call “cautious skills”, the gestures, positioning or support which make it possible to avoid injury or endangerment.
Let’s take a young construction worker, as we report in our book. At the start, with a whole group of novice workers that the company did not take the time to train, he was assigned to tiring tasks, but which were not supposed to require any particular skills. Very often, we give a shovel and we have to dig trenches. But holding a shovel well also requires know-how, which, when not passed on, causes young workers to quickly get hurt. To the point of sometimes generating lasting and annoying pain during work.
You have precisely studied the benefits of passing on good gestures or prudent behavior between generations. How is this transmission essential in work collectives?
These famous “cautious skills” are not all acquired in traditional training. Often, this is somewhat invisible knowledge, which is tamed over time and learned by working alongside a team or a tutor in the workplace. The links between generations, when they can be deployed, often make it possible to effectively acquire protective gestures to save money, to wear out less at work or to know how to deal with the variability of professional situations. It is essential, not only on a physical level, but also on a psychosocial level, on the way we project ourselves and experience our work.
This transmission does not only happen in one direction. At work, it is a reciprocal exchange, where the new arrivals can also teach the older ones. We often think of digital skills for example, but not only: I remember a team of nursing assistants, in a hospital, where the transmission also took place from a younger person to an older one on the well-treatment of patients. .
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