This paper analyzes the current panorama of the child labor in the Brazilian society, approaching its origins, recent trajectory, effects on the children and adolescents and policies developed to combat it. Based on special tabulations of PNAD 2006, it shows the dimension of the phenomenon and how precocious activity differs according to age, sex, place of residence, rural and urban, and the geographical regions, marking their conditions of activity and the perverse impacts on the small workers education and health. Considering as much the economical determinant to child labor as the values and symbolic representations that are in the base of its reproduction, the text concludes highlighting as, in the conditions of the Brazilian development, that it is a phenomenon of difficult eradication.
child labor; children and adolescents; social inequality; Brazil
