There is something of willful blindness in the piecemeal derogations – some frontal, others hollow – demanded during the consultations on Bill 19 on the supervision of child labor. Minister Jean Boulet was right to show his annoyance by recalling that “the safety of young people” and “their educational success” must prevail over the shortage of manpower. A principle that some seem to have conveniently forgotten.
However, this bill did not fall from the sky. It responds to a real danger: the explosion of occupational injuries among minor workers. Between 2017 and 2021, the Commission for Standards, Equity, Health and Safety at Work noted an increase of 540% for those aged 14 and under and 61% for those aged 15-16. This progression continued in 2022 to reach 640% among the former and 80% among the latter, according to data obtained by The Journal of Montreal.
These alarming figures served as a spur to the Minister of Labour, to whom the milieu dangled a softer consensus than one might have believed. These figures call for closer support for the next generation. Also for suitable training. As well as for the urgent collection of detailed data on an exploding phenomenon.
According to preliminary data from the Psychological Health Survey of 12 to 25-year-olds in four Quebec regions released in February, more than half of students in 1D and 2e secondary and two-thirds of students in 3e4e and 5e secondary school held a job at the beginning of 2023. A prodigious and very largely voluntary leap, having a job being rightly perceived as a happy way of gaining autonomy by the majority of young people questioned.
It’s all about balance though. This same survey shows that young people working more than 15 hours per week reported anxiety or depression slightly more often than the others. According to the Statistical Institute of Quebec, the risk of dropping out of school also increases in proportion to the number of hours worked. These are the red lines that must be kept in mind to bring Quebec into this century, which remains the only one in Canada not to have a minimum age for work.
Bill 19 seeks to correct this discrepancy by prohibiting child labor under the age of 14 (except for rare exceptions, such as babysitting or tutoring). It intends to limit the number of hours worked per week during school terms to 17 (including 10, no more, from Monday to Friday). It also takes into account certain specific dynamics, in particular those of family businesses. This basis is not only reasonable, but necessary.
Being a student, for those 16 and under, is a compulsory full-time job, at the rate of a good 40 hours a week, calculates the Autonomous Federation of Education. As it stands, this means that Bill 19 gives its blessing to weeks of nearly 60 hours. Knowing that such a brisk pace can have repercussions on physical and mental health, in addition to acting as a potential school demotivation agent, there is reason to reject any temptation to undermine the basis proposed by this legislative text.
Not to mention that inflation hits some families hard. We thus see the emergence of categories of young people whose work is less the fruit of a chosen emancipation than the expression of the need for additional family support. There are parallels to be drawn with the staggering numbers circulating on the other side of the border, where the New York Times documented a system that abuses thousands of children — mostly, but not exclusively, young migrants — by assigning them tasks and schedules that violate existing laws or circumvent their spirit.
Over there, we are torn between defenders and destroyers of a labor market with gargantuan appetites. We are not there yet, of course, but Quebec is still struggling with a labor market that is also in deep crisis.
Beware of the temptation to put too much on the shoulders of the younger generation.Shortage is not a safe-conduct that allows the most humble tasks and the most difficult schedules to be cavalierly passed on to this category of inexperienced and vulnerable workers.
More broadly, Quebec cannot do without a lucid examination of its relationship to a leisure society that does not weigh heavily against the weight of reality. The issue of the labor shortage is one that must cross all age groups in our society. Are they all providing their fair share of effort? The question is painful and its undertone no less equivocal.
Can we allow ourselves, as a society, to think in such a short term to the point of neglecting to see that the generation that we call on today as reinforcements will lose out tomorrow if we do not put in place a safety net worthy of of that name to protect her? Minister Boulet has a duty to rise above the fray and hold his own. It is about generational fairness.