Also consider the hazards to traveling sales crews: the youngsters coming by the truckloads into neighborhoods to sell magazine subscriptions, etc.
The laissez-faire nature of this form of entrepreneurship is only exceeded by the cavalier attitude of the operators when it comes to hiring supervisors with criminal records and dumping kids on the side of the road with no way to get home if crew chiefs are mad that sales are bad, warns Tessa Couture, an analyst with the anti-human-trafficking group the Polaris Project.
Couture, who wrote a report on the phenomenon for the Polaris Project last year, said another danger to teens that parents should be aware of is the after-work hotel room partying by the crews, which often involves alcohol and drugs.
“It can be a very dangerous situation,” she cautioned. “Threats of physical abuse are quite common.”
The best way for parents to help teens avoid dangerous crews is to look them up online. Bad operators are likely to be the recipients of complaints on the web, said Couture.
A red flag when looking at operators is the would-be employer who doesn’t have a teen fill out a W-2 or other tax paperwork before the job starts.