Kids at risk: children's employment in hazardous occupations in Brazil

Deborah S. DeGraff, Bowdoin College
Andrea R. Ferro, Universidade de São Paulo and University of Minnesota
Deborah Levison, University of Minnesota

Little is known about the connection between parental work and child labor in less developed countries, yet it exists. Building on our earlier research, this paper focuses on jobs that may be hazardous for children (e.g., domestic service, street peddling, tobacco cultivation) in Brazil. We seek to better understand the nature of these hazardous jobs, how children come to be employed in such risky occupations and how this relates to parental characteristics, especially parental employment. The analysis uses household-level data from Brazil’s 2001 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (PNAD-2001), which included a supplement on child work. We use simple and conditional correlations to characterize aspects of children's employment in risky work in comparison to other types of work and to non-employment, and estimate multinomial logit models of children's participation in risky work relative to other work or non-employment. Potential differences between boys and girls are examined throughout the analysis.