Child Labor Research Needs

The Child Labor Working Team of the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH) presents child labor research needs identified as of July 1996 & recommends interagency collaborations. In addition, the Team supplies information about youth employment, occupational injury & illness in young workers, Federal & State regulation of child labor, & national objectives for the occupational safety & health of youths. The Team also describes 10 NIOSH projects focused on young workers in 1996.

In Massachusetts, a 12-year-old girl delivering newspapers is killed when a car strikes her bicycle. In Los Angeles, a 14-year-old boy repeatedly falls asleep in class, exhausted from his evening job. Although children and adolescents may benefit from working, there may also be negative social effects and sometimes danger in their jobs. Protecting Youth at Work looks at what is known about work done by children and adolescents and the effects of that work on their physical and emotional health and social functioning. The committee recommends specific initiatives for legislators, regulators, researchers, and employers. This book provides historical perspective on working children and adolescents in America and explores the framework of child labor laws that govern that work. The committee presents a wide range of data and analysis on the scope of youth employment, factors that put children and adolescents at risk in the workplace, and the positive and negative effects of employment, including data on educational attainment and lifestyle choices. Protecting Youth at Work also includes discussions of special issues for minority and disadvantaged youth, young workers in agriculture, and children who work in family-owned businesses.

Child labour in fishing

This book provides an overview of the current state of knowledge on hazardous child labor, relating the negative and the positive, the problems, and the solutions. The first section samples research on what is known about how children are uniquely affected by workplace hazards and in what settings children are working in hazardous conditions. The second part of the book presents good practices that demonstrate different ways in which hazardous work can be reduced. It explores what can happen when leadership is taken by government, workers, employers, and the community. It also demonstrates that no one party can achieve the result on its own; ultimately, others must support, assist, and do their part. The examples selected here are practical ones that show promise for scaling up nationally and globally.

This new report provides a framework within which to assess compliance with core international labor standards and succeeds in taking an enormous step toward interpreting all relevant information into one central database. At the request of the Bureau of International Labor Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, the National Research Council's Committee on Monitoring International Labor Standards was charged with identifying relevant and useful sources of country-level data, assessing the quality of such data, identifying innovative measures to monitor compliance, exploring the relationship between labor standards and human capital, and making recommendations on reporting procedures to monitor compliance. The result of the committee's work is in two partsâ€"this report and a database structure. Together, they offer a first step toward the goal of providing an empirical foundation to monitor compliance with core labor standards. The report provides a comprehensive review of extant data sources, with emphasis on their relevance to defined labor standards, their utility to decision makers in charge of assessing or monitoring compliance, and the cautions necessary to understand and use the quantitative information.

This book discusses preventive actions that have led to reduction in the prevalence of child labor across the world over the 21st century. It identifies exemplary programs in the area of community prevention that have had exceptional results; for example, the involvement of children in hazardous work globally being reduced by half. It documents a wide range of contexts where concerted action has counteracted social permissiveness towards child labor, including psycho-educational interventions in preventing early school leaving and conditional cash benefits which counteract family poverty. The book presents a set of evidence-based practices that are particularly useful for psychologists, educators, and social workers. More broadly, this book is also of interest to policymakers, professionals, and activists involved in child protection policy or in implementing programs to promote the psychological well-being of children.