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On top of the laws that apply to all workers and employers, there are child labour laws that lay down rules for hiring youth. One purpose of these laws is to protect you from doing work considered too dangerous, too physically demanding, or otherwise inappropriate for a child or teenager, as well as to prevent exploitation of children by adults. Another is to make sure work doesn’t interfere with your education.

It’s a long time ago, but before the first child labour laws were passed, many children worked from an early age, often under appalling conditions. If you were born into a poor, working-class family in the nineteenth or early twentieth century, you could expect to start work when you were as young as 7 years old to help support yourself and your family. You might easily end up in a mine or in a factory doing dirty, repetitive, and possibly dangerous work for very little pay. For a long time, not many adults seemed to care that young people were being treated this way: it just seemed normal. After all, working-class adults had to work in much the same conditions. Eventually, though, people began to ask whether it was right to exploit children in this way and to deny them a chance to get a basic education. The first Canadian laws against child labour, such as Nova Scotia’s 1873 limits on children working in mines, focused mainly on keeping young people out of dangerous industrial jobs at an overly young age. As provinces passed compulsory school attendance laws and people started caring more about children’s well-being, child labour laws became stricter. The conditions that existed back at the start of the twentieth century would be impossible in Canada today. Yet, even in this well-off country, a great many children live in poverty. And in many poorer countries, children still labour, sometimes in harsh conditions, just to help put food on the table.

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