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From the lucky ones who swept the trash and filth from city streets or stood for hours on street corners hawking newspapers, to the less fortunate who coughed incessantly through 10-hour shifts in dark, damp coal mines or sweated to the point of dehydration while tending fiery glass-factory furnaces — all to stoke the profit margins of industrialists whose own children sat comfortably at school desks gleaning moral principles from their McGuffey Readers — the struggle to repeal exploitative 20th century child labour laws has become a key feature of the global social welfare movement.
In B.C., though, as eager youngsters headed back to school this week, they did so at the end of the first summer under B.C.’s regressive new laissez (les enfants) faire child labour laws. With legislation passed last November making the specific laws and standards governing B.C. children in the workplace the most backward in North America (including every corner of George Bush’s United States), the children of poor working families in British Columbia face the risk of exploitation by unscrupulous employers.
In a column written by Charles Demers for Seven Oaks magazine, Mr. Demers writes …
The specifics regarding the deregulation of child labour in British Columbia are absolutely breathtaking in their nefariousness and regressive gall … Children as young as twelve are now permitted to work 20 hours every school-week (35 hours in weeks without school, or in the growing number of districts using a four-day week); they require the permission of only one parent to do so; they may work at any time during the day, including graveyard shifts …
Perhaps most frightening is the fact that the province has shifted from an investigations based system of assessing the safety of workplaces employing children to a complaints based system. All that means that not only do we expect a 12-year-old fixing the deep fryer at 2 a.m. to do so for six bucks an hour, but we expect her to assess the safety of her own workplace and, if she feels uncomfortable, we expect her to fill out the paper work to deal with it.
By deregulating government’s role in overseeing the employment of children in British Columbia, the Campbell government has, once again, placed children in harms way, providing no assurance that children will not be more vulnerable to inappropriate work situations, unsuitable or lengthy hours of work, increased risk of injury, higher incidence of school drop-out and economic exploitation. British Columbians ought to be outraged.
