Child’s Play

Justin Paris, a Montreal university student, didn’t even know the csst existed when he started working as a mover. At sixteen, he was six-foot-one, tall for his age, but his right shoulder soon started to ache. “It hurt so much I couldn’t lift anything,” he recalls. A physiotherapist told him to hold off for three weeks, but he never knew his employer should have compensated him for the lost wages. To measure the true extent of occupational accidents among cegep (post-secondary, pre-university) students, the Institut de recherche Robert-Sauvé en santé et en sécurité du travail (irsst) and the Saguenay-based Groupe écobes interviewed 229 youths aged seventeen and eighteen. They found that for every work-related injury reported, 2.5 went unreported. This suggests that annual occupational accidents involving children under sixteen could amount to 365, one for every day of the year.

Many youths are also unaware that they have a right to refuse dangerous work, according to Karine Brunet, a social work student employed by Droit de cité, a Montreal community group. “They’re utterly surprised when they find out.” Brunet makes a point of telling young employees this when she visits small businesses unannounced to talk about occupational health. Interestingly, when she asks whether they have ever injured themselves at work, virtually no one says yes. But when she asks if they have ever cut or burned themselves in the kitchen, or stumbled down the stairs on their way to the stockroom, everyone, it seems, has a story.

Young workers are accident prone. Quebec’s occupational health and safety board estimates that youths (defined as fifteen to twenty-five) are one and a half times more likely to be injured at work than older employees. “Many people think youths have more accidents because they are young, period,” says Élise Ledoux of the irsst. “But it’s not because they are risk takers. It’s because they are doing dangerous jobs. They manipulate heavy loads, even when they work at Tim Hortons, and handle chemicals when they work as cleaners.”

Occupational health hazards are compounded by long work hours, which lead to other difficulties. At École secondaire Édouard-Montpetit, an east-end Montreal high school I visited recently, two students in grade nine and ten, who work twenty hours a week, said they regularly fall asleep at their desks because they are simply too tired to stay awake. One of them was suspended for two days because of this. “I wasn’t even sleeping,” protested Emilie, who started as a restaurant hostess at age fifteen. “I was just resting.”

Is it finally time, then, for the government to step in? Ghislain Dufour, the former cpq employers’ group president who negotiated the code of ethics, remains opposed to state interventionism. “It’s not my style,” he says. When I suggest that the state might have protected the eight-year-old who shows up as a work casualty in the latest statistics, Dufour counters, “Did this child cut a toe while mowing a lawn in flip-flops? We just don’t know.” Besides, he believes, it is a question of scale. “If we were talking about forty-two eight-year-old children, it might be a different story.”

When workers die on the job, inspectors are sent to investigate. Their reports do not reveal the victim’s name or age, again in the interest of privacy rights, but those details are found in local newspapers. Clearly, even young adolescents have been killed over the past few years. Maxime Degray, thirteen, had picked corn since dawn in Valleyfield, in western Quebec. It was a late-August Friday, a few days before school was to resume. He fell off a slow-moving trailer loaded with 400 kilograms of corn cobs, and slipped under a wheel. Alexandre Fournier, a fourteen-year-old garbage collector, was waiting for a co-worker alongside a dump truck in Grande-Vallée, in the Gaspé. It was January, already dark on the quiet country highway. A car driver did not see him. The boy was crushed against the truck. Mathieu Desjardins-Levac did odd jobs at a sawmill in Rivière-Rouge, northwest of Montreal. One day, he was sent to the basement to clean a conveyor belt. A co-worker later found his dead body trapped in the machinery. He was sixteen.

Other risks can jeopardize a child’s “physical or moral development,” as the labour standards legislation puts it. But they are more difficult to quantify. I landed my first summer job at fourteen, working in a Montreal-area factory that made cartons for milk and cigarettes. I had lied about my age, claiming to be sixteen, then the minimum legal age. One day, two male co-workers forced me to kneel before a third man, who pulled down his zipper and said I would have to suck him off. Nothing happened; it was a joke. But I felt humiliated. When I tell this story to friends, they sometimes share their own anecdotes. For instance, a young woman, now a university student, recalled obscene phone calls when she was a fifteen-year-old waitress doing night shifts at Dunkin’ Donuts. “If the risk of abuse exists at home and at school, why shouldn’t it exist at work? ” asks Esther Paquet, a social work professional and Université de Montréal program coordinator.

Canada has not ratified the International Labour Organization’s convention urging parties to “raise progressively” the minimum age for employment. It has, however, ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which calls on participants to set a minimum age. But the convention “is not solidly embedded in Canadian law, in policy, or in the national psyche,” as the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights noted in 2007. The children of Quebec may find comfort in the fact that they will one day enjoy the protection of their province’s Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms. The elderly, the Charter explicitly states, have “a right to protection against any form of exploitation.” Be patient, kids.