History of Labour Law in The United Kingdom

History Of Labour Law In The United Kingdom

The history of employment law in the United Kingdom concerns the development of UK employment law (or labour law), from its roots in Roman and medieval times in the British Isles up to the present. Before the Industrial Revolution and the introduction of mechanised manufacture, regulation of workplace relations was based on status, rather than contract or mediation through a system of trade unions. Serfdom was the prevailing status of the mass of people, except where artisans in towns could gain a measure of self-regulation through guilds. In 1740 save for the fly-shuttle the loom was as it had been since weaving had begun. The law of the land was, under the Act of Apprentices 1563, that wages in each district should be assessed by Justices of the Peace. From the middle of the 19th century, through Acts such as the Master and Servant Act 1867 and the Employers and Workmen Act 1875, there became growing recognition that greater protection was needed to promote the health and safety of workers, as well as preventing unfair practices in wage contracts.

Read more about History Of Labour Law In The United Kingdom:  Roman Law, Anglo-Saxon England, Medieval England, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, Late Nineteenth Century, Liberal Reforms From 1906, Inter War Period, Post War Consensus, Conservative Government, New Labour

Famous quotes containing the words history, labour, law, united and/or kingdom:

    The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.
    Camille Paglia (b. 1947)

    Coming to Rome, much labour and little profit! The King whom you seek here, unless you bring Him with you you will not find Him.
    Anonymous 9th century, Irish. “Epigram,” no. 121, A Celtic Miscellany (1951, revised 1971)

    It will be seen that we contemplate a time when man’s will shall be law to the physical world, and he shall no longer be deterred by such abstractions as time and space, height and depth, weight and hardness, but shall indeed be the lord of creation.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Next to the right of liberty, the right of property is the most important individual right guaranteed by the Constitution and the one which, united with that of personal liberty, has contributed more to the growth of civilization than any other institution established by the human race.
    William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
    By all thy dower of lights and fires;
    By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
    By all thy lives and deaths of love;
    By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
    And by thy thirsts of love more large then they;
    By all thy brim-fill’d Bowls of fierce desire,
    By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire;
    By the full kingdom of that final kiss
    That seiz’d thy parting Soul, and seal’d thee his;
    Richard Crashaw (1613?–1649)