This is the "Law" section so I just assumed that the subject of the thread falls under this heading better than "careers".
I know of a local Franchisee that has no registered employees, but forces her children to work for her and most of the time doesn't even end up paying them anything, when she does pay them she doesn't even pay them close to minimum wage.
1) Let's say one of her children slipped and fell while working for on the job site and ended up breaking her hip. This person would not be covered by any type of insurance or WCB claim whatsoever, correct?
I know her children, one of them quite well. Neither of them are even aware of employees rights or WCB or minimum wage (by choice or simple negligence, I don't know, both of her children are over the age of 21).
I believe she is also using this tactic to land contracts, since she can bid on a contract for much lower than her competition can (because they have registered employees that they pay minimum wage+), and she has no problem undercutting her competition because she just tells her children that the contract didn't pay out enough money for her to be able to pay them anything...
I asked one of the "employees" (her daughter) why they hadn't been paid that week. They explained to me that there was simply not enough money for them to get paid because the contract didn't pay enough. Correct me if I am wrong here, but TRUE employees of a Franchise get paid FIRST, right? No matter how much the contract paid out, the franchisee is the LAST person to collect a cheque? This is always how I have understood a franchise works, please correct me if I am wrong.
LAST QUESTION: How would the franchising corporation react if they heard about this? Isn't it kind of damaging to the entire organization as a whole since she would also be effectively undercutting her competition within the corporation (other franchisees of the same company) only because she is essentially using slave labour?
FOR CLARIFICATION: This is an immigrant family, both of her children have been made to believe that they are employees and that they get paid a fair wage, when most of the time they do not get paid at all. Don't bother asking how any adult, immigrant or not, could actually believe what is going on is normal, this is their mother that "employs" them and has led them to believe that this is the way a franchise works since they were too young to know any better.
I don't have the heart to explain to either of them that they are being completely exploited by their mother. I came on here to share this situation with you guys to also ask how you would approach the situation, as I care about both of the children and they have been "working" for their mother for over 5 years now, one of them close to 10, and the longer she does this the larger her "unemployment gap" on her resume gets. She has been doing this for her mother since she got out of high school and she has believed that she has been getting paid since then (apparently she owed her mother money for a car that was co-signed for and then written off, so she has been told that her paycheques have been going towards that ~25k loan this entire time, when recently I found out that her mother hasn't paid off a dime on the car).
This is a really sad situation for me, I know a lot of you are going to scroll through this and post "how could anyone be so stupid", please refrain from leaving those comments here. Its not constructive, it makes me sad, and none of you know the entire situation and if you did you wouldn't leave comments like that because it would make you sad too.
Thanks guys