Children At Risk In The Workplace

Topics covered include child labour, occupational health, occupational safety, developed country, developing country.

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.

In At Risk, Karen J. Swift and Marilyn Callahan examine risk and risk assessment in the context of professional practice in child protection, social work, and other human services. They argue that the tools, technologies, and practices used to measure risk to the individual have gone unquestioned and unstudied and that current methods of risk assessment may be distorting the principles of social justice. Central to this study is an examination of the everyday experiences of workers and parents engaged in risk assessment processes in Canadian child welfare investigations. Going beyond theory, Swift and Callahan highlight how risk evaluations play out in actual interactions with vulnerable people. Pointing out that standardized risk assessment tools do not take factors such as class, race, gender, and culture into account, At Risk raises important questions about the viability of risk management plans that are not tailored to individual situations.

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.