Child labour? Heck no! It's volunteerism!

2002-05-03 - 3:21 a.m.

So I was chatting with an old friend and co-worker from back home, and he was catching me up on all the gossip from my old work place.

The juiciest, of course, is that this grocery store, after its last manager tried to break the province's laws by having the store open on sundays (The law forbids sunday shopping in stores over a certain size, with the exception of "garden centres." The brainwave of a manager thought that if he could have a garden centre employee open a cash register inside the store that would be okay), has now instituted a child labour system.

Yes, it's true. Children, well under the legal age of 16, are working at this grocery store every saturday. For NO PAY!

How is this possible?

Well, it seems that our store's "community coordinator" thought it would be a nice gesture to allow peewee hockey teams to volunteer as baggers at the checkouts.

The kids get no pay for their time, aside from tips (which go, of course, to their hockey team) and the store doesn't even give what it would have paid to the actual employees it would hire for the job.

Isn't that a Laff Riot?

Luckily, I think the people I know who are still working there is getting smaller...most of my friends are now happily grazing in greener pastures.

Cheers,

The Magus

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