History of labour law in the United Kingdom

In spite of the steady protest of the Church, slavery (as the exception, not the general rule) did not die out for many centuries, and was apt to be revived as a punishment for criminals, e.g. in the fierce provisions of the statute[which?]

The statutes of Edward I, says Dr. Cunningham, "mark the first attempt to deal with Industry and Trade as a public matter which concerns the whole state, not as the particular affair of leading men in each separate locality."

By the Statute of Cambridge 1388 no servant or labourer, man or woman, however, could depart out of the hundred to serve elsewhere unless bearing a letters patent under the king's seal stating the cause of going and time of return.

This statute (the first against "truck") gives an interesting picture of the way in which clothiers—or, as we should call them, wholesale merchants and manufacturers—delivered wool to spinners, carders, etc., by weight, and paid for the work when brought back finished.

Craft guilds had primarily the same purpose as the Edwardian statutes, that is, of securing that the public should be well served with good wares, and that the trade and manufacture itself should be on a sound basis as to quality of products and should flourish.

A detailed history of labour regulation in the 16th century would include some account of the Tudor laws against vagrancy and methods of dealing with the increase of pauperism, attributable, at least in part, to the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII., and to the confiscation of craft guild funds, which proceeded under the Lord Protector Somerset and Edward VI.

Hiring was to be by the year, and any unemployed person qualified in either calling was bound to accept service on pain of imprisonment, if required, unless possessed of property of a specified amount or engaged in art, science or letters, or being a "gentleman."

While the endeavour to enforce labour apart from a contract died out in the latter end of the 18th century, sentiment for some time had strongly grown in favour of developing early industrial training of children.

A serious outbreak of fever in 1784 in cotton mills near Manchester appears to have first drawn widespread and influential public opinion to the overwork of children, under terribly dangerous and insanitary conditions, on which the factory system was then largely being carried on.

A local inquiry, chiefly by a group of medical men presided over by Dr Thomas Percival, was instituted by the justices of the peace for Lancashire, and in the forefront of the resulting report stood a recommendation for limitation[2] and control of the working hours of the children.

It was directly aimed only at evils of the apprentice system, under which large numbers of pauper children were worked in cotton and woollen mills without education, for excessive hours, under wretched conditions.

Rapid development of the application of steam power to manufacture led to growth of employment of children in populous centres, otherwise than on the apprenticeship system, and before long the evils attendant on this change brought the general question of regulation and protection of child labour in textile factories to the front.

Act 1819, limited as it was, was a noteworthy step forward, in that it dealt with this wider scope of employment of children in cotton factories, and it is satisfactory to record that it was the outcome of the efforts and practical experiments of a great manufacturer, Robert Owen.

Prohibition of child labour under nine years of age and limitation of the working day to twelve in each twenty-four (without specifying the precise hour of beginning and closing) were the main provisions of this act.

Penal compensation for preventable injuries due to unfenced machinery was also provided, and appears to have been the outcome of a discussion by witnesses before the Royal Commission on Labour of Young Persons in Mines and Manufactures in 1841.

From 1842 onwards considerable interaction in the development of the two sets of acts (mines and factories), as regards special protection against industrial injury to health and limb, took place, both in Parliament and in the department (the Home Office) administering them.

Organised inspection began in 1850, and in 1854 the Select Committee on Accidents adopted a suggestion of the inspectors for legislative extension of the practice of several colliery owners in framing special safety rules for working in mines.

The report of the third Children's Employment Commission brought together in accessible form the miserable facts relating to child labour in a number of unregulated industries in the year 1862, and the act of 1864[which?]

is particularly interesting in that it first embodied some of the results of inquiries of expert medical and sanitary commissioners, by requiring ventilation to be applied to the removal of injurious gases, dust, and other impurities generated in manufacture, and made a first attempt to engraft part of the special rules system from the mines acts.

[weasel words][citation needed] As industrial Britannia was extending its Empire, its corporations and its businesses were responsible for half the world's production across a third of the globe's land, a quarter of its population and ruling its waves.

Joint Stock Companies, building railways, canals and factories, manufacturing household goods, connecting telegraphs, distributing coal, formed the backbone of this dominant laissez faire model of commerce.

In particular, the daily limits as to period of employment, pauses for meals, and holidays, needed to be unified for non-textile factories and workshops, so as to bring about a standard working-day, and thus prevent the tendency in "the larger establishments to farm out work among the smaller, where it is done under less favourable conditions both sanitary and educational."

Comparison of the two acts shows, however, that, in spite of the advantages of further consolidation and helpful changes in arrangement of sections and important additions which tend towards a specialised hygiene for factory life, the fundamental features of the law as fought out in the 19th century remain undisturbed.

So far as the law has altered in character, it has done so chiefly by gradual development of certain sanitary features, originally subordinate, and by strengthening provision for security against accidents and not by retreat from its earlier aims.

This provided for special notice to the chief inspector from all occupiers of cotton cloth factories (i.e. any room, shed, or workshop or part thereof in which weaving of cotton cloth is carried on) who intend to produce humidity by artificial means; regulated both temperature of workrooms and amount of moisture in the atmosphere, and provided for tests and records of the same; and fixed a standard minimum volume of fresh air (600 cu ft or 17 m3) to be admitted in every hour for every person employed in the factory.

Its principal objects were: (d) to raise the age of employment of children and restrict the employment of women immediately after childbirth; (e) to require particulars of rate of wages to be given with work to piece-workers in certain branches of the textile industries; (f) to amend the act of 1878 in various subsidiary ways, with the view of improving the administration of its principles, e.g. by increasing the means of checking the amount of overtime worked, empowering inspectors to enter work-places used as dwellings without a justice's warrant, and the imposition of minimum penalties in certain cases.

Under the head of particulars of work and wages to piece-workers an important new power, highly valued by the workers, was given to apply the principle with the necessary modifications by order of the secretary of state to industries other than textile and to outworkers as well as to those employed inside factories and workshops.

With the British Empire in rapid dissolution and immigration from Commonwealth countries, combined with record levels of female workplace participation, the character of Britain's workforce was changing fast.

Though the common law was sometimes comparatively progressive,[11] sometimes not,[12] the first statutes to prohibit discrimination focused on gender and race emerged in the 1960s as the Civil Rights Act was passed in the United States.

While the UK retains essentially the same legal framework as evolved through the 1980s, globalisation, Europeanisation and increased success in workplace participation models ensure further change will follow.