In this article, child labor concepts and practices are taken up again, as analyzed in the author's thesis and ongoing research, to question, in the relationship between work and education, the possibilities of this child and adolescent social being. Giving continuity to the studies, an investigation is made of a policy of eradicating child labor and of having a safety network included in the scope of full protection. The author focuses on the relationship between work and training of both child and young workers and of those who work on the social policies that are part of the conditionalities for the fellowship under the Program for the Eradication of Child Labor (Peti). The text is organized into three sections: the historicity of child labor in the capitalist accumulation process, the production of the 'Work and Education' Working Group, of the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Education (Anped) on the theme, and current status of the issue. Thus, the article emphasizes the 'child labor' object as both the product and engine of the accumulation which, with nuances, remains functional to capital. The successive productive restructuring processes associated with the State's management modes weaken the movements in labor laws on the international level and, in the Brazilian case, the progress represented by the Children and Adolescent Statute (ECA), which maintains and deepens this social wound.
child labor; social being; subject of right; accumulation by dispossession; labor and human development