the varied body of law applied to such matters as employment, remuneration, conditions of work, trade unions, and industrial relations. In its most comprehensive sense the term includes social security and disability insurance as well. Unlike the laws of contract, tort, or property, the elements of labour law are somewhat less homogeneous than the rules governing a particular legal relationship. In addition to the individual contractual relationships growing out of the traditional employment situation, labour law deals with the statutory requirements and collective relationships that are increasingly important in mass-production societies, the legal relationships between organized economic interests and the state, and the various rights and obligations related to some types of social services.

Labour law has won recognition as a distinctive branch of the law within the academic legal community, but the extent to which it is recognized as a separate branch of legal practice varies widely depending partly on the extent to which there is a labour code or other distinctive body of labour legislation in the country concerned, partly on the extent to which there are separate labour courts or tribunals, and partly on the extent to which an influential group within the legal profession practice specifically as labour lawyers.

In the early phases of development the scope of labour law is often limited to the most developed and important industries, to undertakings above a certain size, and to wage earners; as a general rule, these limitations are gradually eliminated and the scope of the law extended to include handicrafts, rural industries and agriculture, small undertakings, office workers, and, in some countries, public employees. Thus a body of law originally intended for the protection of manual workers in industrial enterprises is gradually transformed into a broader body of legal principles and standards, which have basically two functions: the protection of the worker as the weaker party in the employment relationship, and the regulation of the relations between organized interest groups (industrial relations).

The general tendency in the modern development of labour law has been the strengthening of statutory requirements and collective contractual (contract) relations at the expense of rights and obligations created by individual employment relationships. How important these latter remain depends, of course, on the degree of personal freedom in the given society as well as the autonomy of both employer and worker allowed by the actual operation of the economy. In such matters as hours of work, health and safety conditions, or industrial relations, the statutory or collective elements may define most of the substance of the rights and obligations of the individual worker, while with respect to such things as the duration of his appointment, his level and extent of responsibility, or his place in the scale of remuneration, these elements may provide what is essentially a framework for individual agreement.

The origins of labour law can be traced back to the remote past and the most varied parts of the world. While European writers often attach importance to the guilds and apprenticeship systems of the medieval world, some Asian scholars have identified labour standards as far back as the Laws of Hammurabi and rules for labour–management relations in the Laws of Manu; Latin-American authors point to the Laws of the Indies promulgated by Spain in the 17th century for its New World territories. None of these can be regarded as more than anticipations, with only limited influence on subsequent developments. Labour law as it is known today is essentially the child of successive industrial revolutions (Industrial Revolution) from the 18th century onward. It became necessary when customary restraints and the intimacy of employment relationships in small communities ceased to provide adequate protection against the abuses incidental to new forms of mining and manufacture on a rapidly increasing scale at precisely the time when the 18th-century Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the political forces that they set in motion were creating the elements of the modern social conscience. It developed rather slowly, chiefly in the more industrialized countries of western Europe, during the 19th century and has attained its present importance, relative maturity, and worldwide acceptance only during the 20th century.

The first landmark of modern labour law was the British Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802, sponsored by the elder Sir Robert Peel. Similar legislation for the protection of the young was adopted in Zürich in 1815 and in France in 1841. By 1848 the first legal limitation of the working hours of adults was adopted by the Landsgemeinde (citizens' assembly) of the Swiss (Switzerland) canton of Glarus. Sickness insurance and workmen's compensation were pioneered by Germany in 1883 and 1884, and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes was introduced in New Zealand in the 1890s. The progress of labour legislation outside western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand was slow until after World War I. The more industrialized states of the United States began to enact such legislation toward the end of the 19th century, but the bulk of the present labour legislation of the United States was not adopted until after the Depression of the 1930s. There was virtually no labour legislation in Russia prior to the October Revolution of 1917. In India children between the ages of seven and 12 were limited to nine hours of work per day in 1881 and adult males in textile mills to 10 hours per day in 1911, but the first major advance was the amendment of the Factory Act in 1922 to give effect to conventions adopted at the first session of the International Labour Conference at Washington, D.C., in 1919. In Japan rudimentary regulations on work in mines were introduced in 1890, but a proposed factory act was controversial for 30 years before it was adopted in 1911, and the decisive step was the revision of this act in 1923 to give effect to the Washington Convention on hours of work in industry. Labour legislation in Latin America began in Argentina in the early years of the century and received a powerful impetus from the Mexican Revolution, which ended in 1917, but, as in North America, the trend became general only with the impact of the Great Depression. In Africa the progress of labour legislation became significant only from the 1940s onward.

The legal recognition of the right of association for trade union purposes has a distinctive history. There is no other aspect of labour law in which successive phases of progress and regression have been more decisively influenced by political changes and considerations. The legal prohibition of such association was repealed in the United Kingdom in 1824 and in France in 1884; there have been many subsequent changes in the law and may well be further changes, but these have related to matters of detail rather than to fundamental principles. In the United States freedom of association for trade union purposes remained precarious and subject to the unpredictable scope of the labour injunction, by means of which the courts helped restrain trade union activity until the 1930s. The breakthrough for trade unionism and collective bargaining was achieved by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. In many other countries the record of progress and regression with respect to freedom of association falls into clearly distinguished periods separated by decisive political changes. This has certainly been the case with Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, and much of eastern Europe; there have been many illustrations of it, and there may well be more in the developing world.

Labour codes or other forms of comprehensive labour legislation and ministries of labour were not introduced until the 20th century. The first labour code (which, like many of its successors, was a consolidation rather than a codification) was projected in France in 1901 and promulgated in stages from 1910 to 1927. Among the more advanced formulations affecting the general condition of labour were the Mexican (Mexico) Constitution of 1917 and the Weimar (Weimar Republic) Constitution of Germany of 1919, both of which gave constitutional status to certain general principles of social policy regarding economic rights. Provisions of this kind have become increasingly common and are now widespread in all parts of the world.

Departments or ministries of labour responsible for the effective administration of labour legislation and for promoting its future development were established in Canada in 1900, in France in 1906, in the United States in 1913, in the United Kingdom in 1916, and in Germany in 1918. They became general in Europe and were established in India and Japan during the following years and became common in Latin America in the '30s. A labour office was established in Egypt in 1930, but only in the '40s and '50s did similar arrangements begin to take root elsewhere in Asia and Africa. Under differing political circumstances there continue, of course, to be wide variations in the authority and effectiveness of such administrative machinery.

The basic subject matter of labour law can be considered under nine broad heads: employment; individual employment relationships; wages and remuneration; conditions of work; health, safety, and welfare; social security; trade unions and industrial relations; the administration of labour law; and special provisions for particular occupational or other groups.

Employment considered as a basic concept and category of labour law is a relatively recent development. Prior to the Great Depression and World War II the emphasis was upon the prevention or reduction of excessive unemployment rather than upon long-term employment policy as part of a comprehensive scheme to promote economic stability and growth. The new approach, arising from changes in political outlook and contemporary economic thought, has increasingly found expression in legal provisions that establish the creation of employment opportunities as a general objective of policy. To this end, legislation has established the necessary legal framework for the forecasting of manpower needs and availability and the provision of employment services including placement, recruitment, vocational training, and apprenticeship. Freedom from forced labour, equality of treatment in employment and occupation, and unemployment benefits may, in a broad sense, be regarded as part of the same general subject.

The making, modification, and termination of individual employment relations and the resulting obligations for the parties form a second branch of labour law. It may also involve certain aspects of promotion, transfer, and dismissal procedures and compensation. Historically speaking, the law on these matters was at one time described as the law of master and servant. It implied a contractual relation in which one party agreed to be under the control of the other in the sense that the servant was bound to obey orders not only as to the work that he would execute but also as to the details of the work and the manner of its execution. In return, the master had to pay a wage and grant certain minimum conditions for the protection of the worker. As the law developed, the implied terms and statutory incidents attached to this relationship concerning such matters as termination of employment, dismissal procedures and compensation, minimum wages, conditions of work, and social security rights began to limit freedom of contract. The individual employment relationship continues, however, to be the subject matter of labour law to which general legal principles, as opposed to statutes and collective agreements, apply. Legally speaking, the individual contract of employment plays a more important role in the civil-law countries than in common-law countries.

The substantive law on wages and remuneration covers such elements as forms and methods of payment, the protection of wages against unlawful deductions and other abuses, minimum wage arrangements, the determination of wages, fringe benefits, and, in highly sophisticated economies, incomes policies. The concept of wage regulation as a restraint upon extreme social evils has gradually been superseded by wage policies as deliberate instruments of positive management designed to promote economic stability and growth.

Legal requirements concerning the forms of wages and methods of wage payment deal with such matters as the proper notification of wage conditions, the payment of wages in legal tender or by check, the limitation and proper valuation of payments in kind, the freedom of the worker to dispose of his wages, regularity in wage payments, the treatment of wages as a privileged, or secured, debt, and restrictions upon the attachment or assignment of wages.

Minimum-wage (minimum wage) regulation takes varied forms; it may, following the pattern originally set by the British Trades Boards Acts from 1909 onward, provide for wages councils or similar bodies to fix wages in trades that have no arrangements for collective agreements and where wages are exceptionally low; it may consist, as in Australia and New Zealand, essentially of arbitration arrangements; or it may, as in the United States under the Fair Labor Standards acts (Fair Labor Standards Act), provide a statutory rate or criteria for determining such a rate. Statutory provisions and collective agreements for determining wages may embrace such varied matters as skill differentials, the elimination of race and sex differentials, payment according to results and the relationship of wages to productivity, and wage guarantees for agreed periods of time. Fringe benefits, such as bonuses payable in varying contingencies, are typically a matter for collective agreements. Incomes policies (incomes policy) remain the subject of much controversy. Their general purpose, sometimes embodied in legislation and sometimes expressed in collective agreements or statements of government policy, is to restrain inflationary pressures resulting from wage increases unrelated to increased productivity and to do this in a manner that promotes a fairer distribution of income.

The conditions of work involve hours, rest periods, and vacations; the prohibition of child labour and regulation of the employment of young persons; and special provisions concerning the employment of women. This part of the law originated in legislation for the protection of children, young persons, and women against the worst evils of the Industrial Revolution. It originally dealt particularly with such matters as admission to employment, night work, and excessive hours, but the elements of its content and their relative importance have been wholly transformed during the 20th century.

As economic and educational progress and changed social habits have limited child labour in the industrialized countries, and increasingly in the modernized sectors of developing economies, the special concern of labour law with regard to the young has shifted to such areas as vocational guidance and training, career planning and advancement, and medical protection.

As employment opportunities for women have become more varied and responsible, there has been a similar shift of emphasis from protective legislation, which has come to be regarded as discriminatory since it tends to limit such opportunities, to legal guarantees of equal pay and equal employment, coupled with adequate maternity protection and the provision of facilities to enable women with family responsibilities to continue to be employed.

Whereas previously any statutory limitation of the hours of work of adult males was regarded as being highly questionable, except in mines where it had been introduced on safety grounds, in a society of much increased leisure it has now become a general practice to fix maximum hours of work by statute or collective agreement. In many countries the eight-hour day has been superseded by the 40-hour week as the statutory maximum for a wide range of occupations, and collective agreements providing for substantially shorter working hours are not uncommon. The details of hours regulation, whether by statute or collective agreement, include such matters as exceptions and adjustments necessary for continuous shift working. In addition, such regulations cover the extensions permitted for preparatory, complementary, and intermittent work; the special rules for force majeure (work of absolute necessity), accident, maintenance, and repair work; and the limitation, authorization, and remuneration of overtime.

The principle of resting one day of the week, sanctioned as it is by religious practice in many places, was widely incorporated in legislation at an early date; the lengthening of this weekly rest through the creation of the five-day week has been strongly influenced by statutory requirements and collective agreements.

Legislation granting annual holidays (holiday) with pay and collective agreements providing for such holidays are almost entirely a development of the mid-20th century but are increasingly common; moreover, there is a marked tendency for the minimum annual holiday to be increased.

Complex questions may arise concerning the qualifying period of service required for entitlement, breaks in the continuity of service, the calculation of average or normal remuneration for the purpose of the holidays, the extent to which holidays may be divided, and the liability for holidays where there has been a change of employer.

Such general matters as occupational health and accident prevention regulations and services; special regulations for hazardous occupations such as mining, construction, and dock work; and provisions concerning such health and safety risks as poisons, dangerous machinery, dust, noise, vibration, and radiation constitute the health, safety, and welfare category of labour law. The efforts of organized safety movements and the progress of occupational medicine have produced comprehensive occupational health and accident-prevention services and regulations no longer limited to a few specially acute risks but covering the full range of dangers arising from modern industrial processes. Major developments include increased concern with the widespread use of chemicals and increasing provision for welfare (social welfare program) facilities related to employment, including feeding, rest, recreation, and transport facilities.

Social security ranges from basic employers' liability for occupational accidents to comprehensive schemes that include income security in the form of sickness, unemployment, retirement, employment injury, maternity, family, invalidity, and survivors' benefits and medical care. As with other aspects of labour law, a progression from the particular to the general has been characteristic of the development of social security legislation. By the time of World War I, workmen's compensation (workers' compensation) schemes were general in industrialized and industrializing countries, but they were highly restrictive in their provisions for specific cases. pension insurance was part of Otto von Bismarck's legacy to Germany, but elsewhere there was little more to be found than pension funds for the privileged or noncontributory pensions for the aged. Great Britain had been the pioneer in health and unemployment insurance. But social insurance remained a pragmatic experiment limited to a few countries advanced in both economic development and social policies. The coverage was limited to specific risks for certain categories of protected persons. Its object was to protect the worker against the hazards of life for which preindustrial societies provide by some form of community or family responsibility, but the approach was piecemeal and was limited to the most manageable cases of acute hardship. Eventually, the impact of the world economic depression (Great Depression) of the 1930s and World War II in the industrial nations and the increasingly apparent inadequacy of earlier forms of community responsibility in developing countries transformed the position. The concept of social security, first given statutory expression in the United States in 1935 and in New Zealand in 1938, superseded that of social insurance, and the Beveridge Report of 1943 developed it even further to provide a basic income for all in need of such protection, in addition to providing comprehensive medical care. The concept has continued to broaden since that time, and social security has found increasing acceptance, though necessarily with varying degrees of practical application, in countries in the most varied stages of economic development.

Acute, sometimes highly controversial, problems, particularly in the cost and efficiency of administrative organization of social security programs and of medical care, remain almost everywhere. But many countries have made progress in making higher standards of medical care available as a legal right and in converting the guarantee of a basic income as a protection against want into provision for effective income maintenance in the event of unemployment or loss of the family breadwinner. The idea is still developing. The trend is to broaden it to the point at which it includes all the varied hazards of life, including accidents of any kind, with the idea of facilitating economic growth by reducing the human cost of structural change. The pattern varies widely in different countries, partly as a reflection of different relationships between social security and private life, retirement, and health insurance, and partly because of differences in economic and social conditions.

A number of complex legal relationships fall under the heading of industrial relations, including the legal status, rights, and obligations of trade unions (organized labour) and employers' organizations, collective bargaining and collective agreements, the representation of employees at plant and enterprise level (including joint consultation and, where it exists, codetermination and other forms of workers' participation in management, even to the extent of workers' representation on company boards), and the prevention and settlement of various types of labour disputes in general and of strikes and lockouts in particular. There are wide variations both in the extent to which such matters as the representative character and capacity of trade unions, their legal status, the obligation to recognize and bargain with them, the enforceability of collective agreements, the scope of activities permitted to trade unions, and their obligations in contract and tort are subject to legal rules and in the content of such rules. In the United States, for instance, there is a considerable body of law on these subjects, the most important enactments being the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) and the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (the Taft–Hartley Act); in the United Kingdom the law has hitherto remained marginal to most of these trade union issues, except for legislation of 1871, 1875, and 1906, which had provided certain “immunities,” or “privileges,” as they are sometimes called, for trade unions, particularly in connection with trade disputes. Legislation enacted in the early 1980s restricted some of these immunities or privileges, the trend being to expand the role of law in labour–management relations to reduce the increasing disruption caused by industrial conflict in a complex society. How to reconcile freedom of association and collective bargaining with the stability and growth of the economy remains the most challenging and difficult problem of labour law.

Another feature of labour law involves the organization and functioning of administrative authorities such as labour departments, labour inspection services, and other organs of enforcement. Administration of the law also encompasses the operation of labour courts and other bodies for the settlement of grievances arising from existing contracts or collective agreements and of industrial disputes arising between labour and management.

The principal problem in many countries is to relate the process of labour administration and its special intimacy with labour and management to overall economic and social planning in a manner that gives proper weight to social considerations in economic policy. This problem falls mostly outside the scope of labour law, but its solution does depend in part on the extent to which labour law provides for and secures effective standards of administration.

Labour law includes many provisions for particular occupational or other groups. These sometimes appear as special parts of a general code, special legislation, or provisions that limit specific legislative provisions with regard to particular groups. These special provisions are common and important in mining, transportation (and in particular maritime transport), commercial occupations, and agriculture. Cutting across these broad sectors of economic activity are the traditional legal distinctions made in some countries between blue-collar workers and salaried employees and certain newer distinctions, such as that between employees who earn annual salaries and have rights of tenure and persons with no such rights engaged and remunerated on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.

Among the distinctive elements of labour law that reflect the political, socioeconomic, and legal differences among countries are variations in the relative importance of statutory regulation and collective agreements, the prevalence of national or industrial collective agreements as opposed to company or plant agreements, the importance in certain countries of arbitral awards, and the extent to which labour law has been affected by a country's constitutional structure, especially with regard to judicial review of constitutionality of legislation and judicial interpretation of constitutional powers, limitations, and guarantees.

In the United Kingdom, for instance, the tradition has been to allow a maximum of initiative and freedom to employers' and workers' organizations in the regulation of their mutual relations and the determination of conditions of work. Most countries on the Continent, by contrast, have detailed legislative provisions on these matters.

In the United Kingdom, however, the reluctance to legislate is becoming less marked; there is now legislation concerning industrial training and discrimination in employment, formerly matters for collective agreement; and legislation concerning collective bargaining, safeguards against unfair dismissal, and certain trade union practices was enacted in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In virtually all the developing countries the absence of an established tradition of collective bargaining and the importance of the part played by the state in economic development have placed a premium on legislative action.

The coverage and scope, term of validity, and legal effect of collective agreements vary widely. In Sweden there has been a practice of national negotiations covering the whole of industry; in the United Kingdom agreements generally cover an industry or occupation in the country as a whole or a particular industrial area; in the United States and in Japan the unit of negotiation is generally the company or plant. The contrast may be less significant in practice than in principle, since an important company or plant agreement tends to set an industry-wide pattern of negotiation (e.g., in the automobile industry of the United States); nevertheless, the difference is important.

In Australia and New Zealand conciliation and arbitration tribunals determine matters normally dealt with in other countries by legislation or collective agreement, such as wages, hours, and conditions of work. The example has had some influence on systems of arbitration courts established in developing countries, notably in Asia and East Africa, but there is no tendency for it to be widely imitated elsewhere except as a device for avoiding deadlocks in negotiation, especially in essential public services.

In the United States and Canada the development of labour law has been affected by questions of constitutionality, which not only influenced its ultimate form but also retarded its development. In the United States the constitutionality of workmen's compensation laws was much debated until it was favourably settled by the Supreme Court in 1917; child-labour and minimum-wage regulations were delayed by judicial decisions holding them to be outside federal competence and, in some cases, inconsistent with the constitutional guarantee against deprivation by the state of life, liberty, and property without due process of law (the guarantee here applying to the factory owner). The first attempt of President Franklin Roosevelt's (Roosevelt, Franklin D.) administration to regulate hours and wages by codes of fair competition during the Great Depression was also held to be unconstitutional as an improper delegation of legislative power by Congress to the executive branch. But thereafter the temper of judicial review changed, and the validity of federal legislation guaranteeing free collective bargaining, regulating wages and hours, and establishing social security was upheld. In Canada, a pioneer in establishing a labour department, restrictive judicial interpretations of the powers of the federal government had a similar effect, and only after World War II did federal–provincial cooperation afford a basis for achieving greater uniformity and more rapid progress.

The range of possible solutions for similar problems often consists of variations of detail on a limited number of options, and certain common elements, often expressed in identical or almost identical texts, recur in the law of different countries. These elements derive partly from the legislation of other nations but increasingly from the influence on the law of the international standards evolved by the International Labour Organisation (ILO).

From the beginnings of modern labour legislation in the early 19th century, the law of certain countries has been extensively used by other countries as a model. For example, British factory legislation was widely copied at an early date, and German social-insurance legislation provided a prototype from the time of Bismarck's reforms. British legislation has continued to serve as a model for the basic legislation of many states that were formerly British dependencies and remains in force subject to modifications made since independence. Much of the French Labour Code became applicable through the 1952 Labour Code for Overseas Territories to the states that were formerly French dependencies and remains the basis of their labour law. The U.S. legislation of the period from the 1930s onward has been exported to Japan, the Philippines, Liberia, and other countries. The Mexican Labour Law of 1931, varied by elements derived primarily from European models, had considerable influence on the early development of labour law in a number of Latin-American countries. Through quite another process, the labour law of the Soviet Union (until the country's dissolution in 1991) reshaped without replacing some of the earlier elements in the labour law of the other Socialist states. On the whole, however, the national influences of particular countries and legal systems are declining.

During the mid-20th century the standards evolved by the ILO (International Labour Organization) became the leading external influence upon the labour law of many countries. They had a far-reaching impact in virtually all the advanced countries except the United States and the erstwhile Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), where external influences were secondary. In much of the developing world they were of great importance even before independence, since much of the legislation sponsored there by the colonial powers was based on ILO standards.

The ILO, created in 1919 as an autonomous partner of the League of Nations and since 1946 a specialized agency associated with the United Nations, adopts international standards in the form of conventions and recommendations. Conventions when ratified become binding obligations of the member states ratifying them; recommendations are designed as guides for legislation, collective agreements, administrative measures, and so on. Elaborate follow-up arrangements, including examination of regular reports and commissions of inquiry into complaints, are provided to ensure that the obligations assumed are fulfilled. These standards, which already cover, in varying degrees of detail and at varied stages of development, virtually all the more important branches of labour law, are constantly amplified and revised at the annual sessions of the International Labour Conference.

Unification, or, as the process is often called, harmonization, of labour law is one of the professed purposes of a number of regional organizations in different parts of the world, but only in the Council of Europe, the European Union, and the Organization of American States have tangible measures been taken, largely based on ILO standards. The more important instruments adopted are the European Social Charter, the European Social Security Code, the Social Security Regulations of the European Community, and the Central American Convention on Social Security for Migrant Workers. The Conferences of American and African Labour Ministers, sponsored by the Organization of American States and the Organization of African Unity respectively, and the Conference of Asian Labour Ministers, which has developed without any comparable sponsorship, discuss matters of general policy and the coordination of action in the ILO rather than the formulation of specific standards. An Arab Labour Organization was created in 1970.

Labour law differs from the older branches of the law in that its history has been in some cases so much influenced by the ebb and flow of political change, its development so rapid, and its expansion on a world scale so recent that it is difficult to predict its future. But the trend is clear. In no place is labour law losing importance. While some types of protective legislation, notably special provision for the protection of women workers, are losing their importance, the tendency is toward more comprehensive legislation embracing a wider range of subjects and often dealing with matters previously left to collective agreement, individual contract, or the discretion of the employer.

The transition everywhere has been from a class law protecting the weakest segment of society to a community law designed to serve the common interest. This development is seen in the elimination of limitations and exceptions to the law and in the increasing emphasis given to matters of general interest, including full employment, equitable distribution of wealth, and community responsibility for the incidence of misfortune in individual lives.

Labour law must also be said to serve the social interest in promoting constructive industrial relations and reducing the occurrence of open conflict. This evolution of labour law is an important contribution to the evolution of the law as a whole, from a law for the propertied and trading classes with a special chapter for the working class to a common law for the entire community.

The importance of a body of law that has a dynamic and progressive impact rather than a restrictive influence is now widely understood, and the need for legal flexibility to facilitate economic and social development and change is increasingly appreciated. In addition, the value of delegated powers and procedures of consultation with interested groups and organizations to achieve such flexibility is more generally recognized. Social objectives remain the test of the validity of economic policy, and labour law plays a major part in defining these objectives and ensuring that economic policy respects them in the interest of the whole community.