Research shows that young people often enter employment in precarious circumstances, with limited knowledge of employment rights. Young people enter work with differing levels of skills, expectations, and confidence to address problems, and may not identify issues with contracts, pay, harassment or health and safety as being legal in nature.

Justiciable problems are everyday issues which may have a legal solution. For young people, the links between justiciable problems and mental health are particularly strong, with psychological distress a common consequence of justiciable problems, including those relating to their employment.

This paper uses the Public Understanding of Law Survey (PULS) to examine the experience of employment problems of those aged 18 to 24 compared to older respondents, including problem prevalence, adverse consequences, including impacts to mental health, what, if anything, was done to try to resolve employment problems, and what the outcomes were. How employment problems interacted with other justiciable and life problems, the role of knowledge and capability in dealing with such problems, and implications of these findings, particularly for legal assistance service design and community legal education, are also examined.