labour

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labour

the human input to work activity. See JOB, CAPITAL.

labour

the contribution to productive activity made by the workforce both by hand (for example, the assembly of a car) and mentally (for example, devising a stock-control system). Labour is one of the three main FACTORS OF PRODUCTION, the others being NATURAL RESOURCES and CAPITAL. See alsoECONOMIC GROWTH, HUMAN CAPITAL.

References in classic literature ?

The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous to this improvement.

The true husbandman will cease from anxiety, as the squirrels manifest no concern whether the woods will bear chestnuts this year or not, and finish his labor with every day, relinquishing all claim to the produce of his fields, and sacrificing in his mind not only his first but his last fruits also.

View in context

When there is only so much of the same thing, and when two men want all they can get of the same thing, there is a conflict of interest between labor and capital.

View in context

In 1883 Cardinal Emile Taschereau sent to the Holy See a copy of the constitutions of the Knights of Labor, which was gaining support among French-Canadian workers.

Irish workers in Victorian Toronto

After years of relative acquiescence in market reforms, organized labor appears to be a new and disruptive player in 1997.

Korea's labor laments

The immediate postwar period in Palestine had witnessed a resurgence of union struggles, sometimes based on joint Arab and Jewish worker action, as worker militancy recovered from the brutal suppression of the 1936-39 nationalist uprising (in which Jewish labor was systematically recruited to replace Arab strikers).

Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948

Here, amid the slacks and the shoes, the suits and children's toys; here, where every item seems almost preternaturally clean and new, some very old and unseemly problems are lurking -- ungodly factory conditions, long hours and slave wages, disappearing union organizers, and child labor.

Don't shop at someone else's expense

The purpose of this study is to examine the foundations of occupational labor markets, structural changes in the labor market, the complexity of labor laws, the causal relationship between labor legislation and labor market outcomes, and the positive externalities of labor market regulations, and the role of migrant workers in urban labor markets.

The flexibility demands of globalized labor markets: active labor market policies in a flexicurity system

According to Linda Golodner, co-chair of the Child Labor Coalition, poverty is the main force behind child labor.

Lost childhoods: millions of African children are forced to do dangerous, backbreaking jobs. Why?

In Yugoslavia, however, the system failed to produce enough jobs to fully employ Yugoslavs because the socialist worker-managers viewed new additions to the labor force as "profit" poachers who would cut into their share of the "profit" pie.

The broom of Titoism: how developing nations are compensating for weak labor markets

SINCE RECONSTRUCTION, BLACKS' unionization activity has taken two forms: attempts to integrate large white labor groups and attempts to build black unions.

Hard labor: scholars chronicle the relationship of African Americans to unions and the industrialization of America

It concluded that, to the extent those departments' costs include labor costs that can be identified or associated with particular units or groups of units of specific produced property, such costs are direct labor costs and not MSC.