Injuries in Child Laborers in the Informal Sector in Mexico City, Mexico, 1997

Abstract

Sherry L. Baron, MDa In the mid-1990s, I was on a temporary assignment through the Pan American Health Organization to Mexico City. During my assignment, I oversaw a collaborative training program in occupational and environmental epidemiology between the Pan American Health Organization and the Mexican Secretary of Health. Through this training pro gram, one student, Dr. Zoila L?pez Sibaja, developed a pilot project to better character ize work-related injuries to children employed in the informal sector. The growth of the informal employment sector throughout the developing world has the potential to place workers and especially child labor at particularly high risk for work-related injuries. According to the International Labour Organization, in Latin America during the 1990s, the urban informal sector was the primary generator of new jobs.1 The informal sector is defined by the International Labour Organization as either self-employed workers and their unpaid family members, or workers (either paid or unpaid) in very small businesses (fewer than 5-10 workers), apprentices, contract labor, home workers, and paid domestic workers. The employment conditions of informal workers are based mostly on casual employment relations rather than contractual ar rangements with formal labor protections, such as protection under child labor laws. A small but important part of the informal employment sector is street children.1 Street children is a term used for child laborers who work and live in the street and may or may not maintain contact with their families. Although street children face many health risks ranging from violence to drug use, an important priority is protecting them from working conditions that may damage their health and well-being, especially work-related injuries.2 In Mexico, the Federal Labor Law clearly prohibits child labor under age 14; from age 14-16, children may work if they remain in school. However, in 1994 the Mexican Statistics Institute (INEGI) reported that 34.3% of children younger than age 15 were working.3 A joint survey by UNICEF and the government of Mexico City estimated that during the same time period there were over 11,000 street children in the central area of Mexico City, of whom about 1,000 both lived and worked in the streets.4 To address the general public health problem of injuries, in 1994, Mexico established the System of Epidemiological Surveillance of Externally Causes Injuries (SVELECE), with the primary objective to count, analyze, and then prevent injuries. According to SVELECE, 13% of the injuries that occurred in 1996 happened in the 5-17-year-old group, and, of the injuries occurring in that age group, 5% happened in the workplace.5 Since this data may undercount injuries in children employed in the informal sector, my student's pilot study was designed to estimate the proportion of childhood injuries resulting from work with a focus on informal sector workers.