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 of, history, labour, law, united and/or kingdom:

    “No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
    —Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)

    “Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Indeed, I thought, slipping the silver into my purse ... what a change of temper a fixed income will bring about. No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”
    —Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

    “Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law ... cannot be found in a rational state of society.”
    —Robert Owen (1771–1858)

    “The United States never lost a war or won a conference.”
    —Will Rogers (1879–1935)

    “O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
    The brightest heaven of invention!
    A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
    And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!”
    —William Shakespeare (1564–1616)