In the north, it is mainly immigrant children, children from minority groups and poor children who work and in the south, it tends to be children form lower classes, refugee children and immigrant children who work in the most dangerous isolated conditions. Furthermore, boys and girls may work in different industries and be exposed to different dangers. All of these inequalities make solutions to child labour even more complex. In order to protect the class or racial status quo, people argue against education for lower classes, for female children, etc. In these instances child labour is used to maintain equality.
Child labour is definitely an issue for trade union movement.
Children are employed as regular employees in all areas. Child labour weakens the power of all adults, as they are forced to compete with children for jobs and parents can not work because companies prefer to hire their children. Employers are using the most vulnerable in society to undennine our battle for safe, fair and democratic work places. The Canadian trade union movement has been fighting against child labour since we came into existence. In the early part of this century we pushed our own government to abolish child labour.