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On the 10/10/2012 a guest speaker was invited to speak to the Transition Year students. His name was Alan Harper and he works for Aware, a mental health organisation. The reason behind the talk was to try and open our minds to mental health and get people thinking positively. Alan started by showing us two videos. The first was a lot of very near misses and escapes from life threatening injuries. Most people found it amusing but everyone was thinking the same thing, those people were lucky. The second video was about an Austrailian man without any arms or legs and, although he looked on life positively, everyone's feeling after that video was that he was unlucky. Alan showed us a graph which showed how a person's mood can change constantly over the day. Which it had already, three times since the talk started and we were only 10 minutes in. By writing down the good things that happen to us, Alan tried to get everyone thing positively, instead of remembering the negative things which seem to stay with us for longer. That's when he showed us the coping triangle containing thoughts, feelings and actions. He showed us that you can take action against the bad things by thinking about why it has affected you. Text: CF
Today we had a talk about our rights as students and workers with a representative from Youth Connect. He told us about our right to having a student council elected by the students and also informed us about the benefits of having a student council, such as having our voices heard and letting the management know what we want to improve our school lives. Next, we watched a short video highlighting our rights as students and young workers. It explained possible solutions to common problems that occur, such receiving minimum wages depending on your age and receiving a payslip every week or month. The key facts we learnt today were: • Everyone has the right to join a trade union • Everyone has a right to a minimum wage (€6.06 for under 18 year olds and €8.65 for over 18 year old experienced workers) • Everyone has a right to written terms & conditions (Contract) • Everyone has a right to a payslip (as proof of legal employment) • Everyone has a right to dignity & respect • Everyone has a right to a safe working environment • Everyone has a right to a break (30 minutes every 4 hours for under 16 year olds or 30 minutes every 4.5 hours for 16-17 year olds!) We also learned about child labour. There are a staggering 250,000,000 child labourers in the world. That's one in seven children. But this is not purely just exploitation, some children have to work to keep food on the table. We learned about sub-Saharan africa and how it has a high poplulation density because people migrate from the Sahara. We saw a video about three child labourers in the congo who were in a mine and worked all day with no safety equipment and little breaks. Their rights clearly weren't being respected but if the employer was forced to respect workers' rights they would go somewhere else where they wouldn't have laws to protect workers because it would be cheaper. I found the talk to be very helpful because it answered a few questions I had about employing under 18s i.e. length of hours we could work and our minimum wage. He also informed us about how to join the ISSU and provided us with forms to register for a student card that can give us discounts in shops and cinemas. I appreciate Ms. O’Toole organising the talk and would recommend that maybe the same talk could be given to next year’s TY students as it was very informative and very useful – especially if the students are planning to take business for the Leaving Cert! To find out more, go to the Youth Connect website by clicking here Text: ED & LB |
Speakers' Corner"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen." Archives
October 2015
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