Peer Leaders Learn about the Roots of TL@W

Just over two decades since its founding, this past February, our Teens Lead @ Work (TL@W) peer leaders met with a very important person who played a powerful role in the direction of our young worker program, Taciana Ribeiro Saab.
Taciana’s son, Cristian Ribeiro Giambrone, was 18 years old when he was killed on the job working for CVS in Boston. In February of 2004, Christian pursued a suspected shoplifter who, just steps outside his workplace, fatally stabbed him. The tragic event led to MassCOSH’s focus on organizing young workers to better protect them on the job, efforts that ultimately resulted in MassCOSH launching its TL@W program.

After introductions on Zoom, Taciana and the peer leaders watched a video created by Tufts University students in 2005 that detailed the events surrounding the loss of Cristian and the formation of TL@W that you can watch here https://www.facebook.com/Masscosh/videos/1144603679619854. Given most of our current TL@W teens were not yet born when the video was created, it gave these young leaders an in-depth education on how Taciana and MassCOSH peer leaders successfully changed the state’s Child Labor Laws to prevent tragedies like the one that led to Christian’s death from ever happening again.

After watching the video, Taciana bravely spoke about her tragic loss and how she channeled her pain into advocacy. In 2004, two thirds of young people working for area pharmacies had never received workplace safety training, including her son, and she vowed to change that. To a virtual room full of young people approximately her son’s age before he passed, Saab stressed how important the peer leaders’ jobs are in protecting young people’s health and safety on the job and wished them luck in their work.