A discussion of hazardous child labor.

Child labor has been a fundamental concern within the international community for almost a century—and significantly longer at the country level. Driven by a desire to protect those who often are the most vulnerable from deplorable and extreme working conditions, both the national and international communities have sought to implement laws and standards to regulate child labor. The protection of child workers has provided the impetus behind which many of the first labor laws were formed.1 The international community has sought to regulate child labor by defining what constitutes hazardous working conditions through evolving legislative measures. In terms of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention 182,2 it is useful to understand hazardous work from several perspectives: historical, developmental, and workplace exposure. There is a surprising similarity between how hazardous work has been defined historically and in contemporary discussions. Regrettably, there has been little integration of issues related to child development, education, and public health in order to gain a greater depth of understanding of child labor. This failure is easy to understand given the difficulties inherent in developing policies that integrate education and public health with the workplace.