At an age when some children still play with Legos, Adrien dutifully stacks cans on a shelf. Every night, the young boy runs out of school to come to work in this supermarket on the north end of the island of Montreal. Working two hours every day after school makes for a busy schedule for this 12-year-old boy. At the cash registers of this same supermarket, very young adolescents like him help customers fill their bags. How many hours a week do they work, at what wages? The manager refuses to answer.
However, in theory, the employment of these minors is perfectly legal. In Quebec, there is no minimum age required to start working. The law on labor standards only lists a few restrictions: The employer must make sure to obtain the written authorization of the parents for minors under 14 years of age. Up to the age of 16, they may not work during school hours, and night shifts are prohibited.
In 2016, a survey conducted by the Institut de la Statistique du Québec found that one in three schoolchildren had a paid job during the school year. This is a very special situation, which makes Quebec, and Canada more generally, an exception among the members the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) when it comes to child labor.
'Child Empowerment'
"In the late 1990s, the deregulation of evening and weekend retail hours led to an explosion in the need for part-time labor," said Elise Ledoux, a professor of ergonomics and specialist in labor issues at the Université du Québec in Montreal. "Schoolchildren, freed from classes in the early afternoon under Quebec's school schedule, were an ideal workforce for a few hours a day."
Today, the phenomenon is reaching an unprecedented scale. According to a Statistics Canada study, the employment rate of minors in Quebec exceeds 51%. The province's current economic situation – an unemployment rate of only 3.9% and a worker shortage exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic, with some 240,000 vacancies – is increasing the pressure on employers. The side effect is that immigrant labor and minors are particularly courted. On the nation's highways, fast-food giants such as Tim Hortons and McDonald's are aggressively advertising on huge billboards that promise parents that a job with them "will help [their] child's career."
Whether they are tasked with baking bread in a bakery, stocking shelves or waiting tables, children, like their elders, are at the mercy of burns, falls or injuries
"In our very North American culture, the empowerment of children through work has always been encouraged by parents, regardless of their income level. At the same time, their offspring were happy to be part of consumer society," said Charles Fleury, a sociologist at Laval University in Quebec City.
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