Very good post...

...and it's fully in harmony with the research conducted by Robert Epstein for his two books, The Case Against Adolescence and Teens 2.0. The two reasons you mentioned were the two main purposes of child labor laws being instituted, not keeping children and teens safe. As you mentioned, if their sole concern was to protect children and teens from the risk of serious harm, they could simply have barred kids from hazardous jobs only and passed strict laws against sweatshop conditions.