Another teen killed while at a construction site illegally

'The community of Stony Mountain gathered Thursday afternoon to remember Andrew James, the 15-year-old boy who died last week underneath a load of scalding asphalt on a construction site near the southern Manitoba town....

James was not working legally at the time of his death. Manitoba law prohibits people under age 16 from working on construction sites. RCMP said it appeared the boy was helping to unload asphalt from a truck when he was buried under its contents......James family said that they supported his summer job and did not blame the company for his death......."


His family SUPPORTED his working there illegally at a VERY DANGEROUS job with heavy machinery and scalding asphalt? Good parenting and concern for their kid, at the height of it's finest hour. UNbelievable. The company AND his parents should be criminally prosecuted for child endangerment.

It is not like he would have lived if he was 16 year old instead and working legally.

wow...now THAT'S a way to die.
Yeesh.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

I have more sympathy for the company than for the parents. When I was 14, I told the nearby tomato farm that I was 16 so that I could work there. They didn't check papers or anything, so there was no way they could have known.

Why the parents would consent to let an underage kid work on arguably one of the most dangerous jobsites imaginable is beyond me. Were they that desperate to get him out of their hair for a few hours? Why? Could he not have found the usual benign teen job elsewhere? I view this as the parents' fault.

Gang, think back to what you learned in history about the reason child labor laws passed in the 1910s-1920s. Those evil companies were making children as young as 6 work on hazardous equipment, in dangerous factories, and even down in coal mines, often for 12 or more hours a day. All for real, no joke.

What the standard histories never seem to tell you is that the evil companies didn't simply snatch small children to force them to work under these conditions, though you might be inclined to think that. No. The parents of the children made them go to work to support the family. In other words, the parents profited from their young child's long, dangerous labor. They were ultimately to blame. The usual reason was not enough income and too many mouths to feed (other children in the family)—as if this was the responsibility of the children forced to labor. The parents made bad life decisions and the kids had to pay.

Wanna bet that this is a poor family who expected their late son to help support the parents' bad decisions?

By the way, the real reason child labor laws passed was to protect adult workers from being replaced by children doing the same wage for a pittance. Shades of some goings-on today...

I smell a lawsuit!!!!!!!!