| Act of Parliament | |
 | |
| Long title | An Act to amend and extend the Law relating to Factories and Workshops. |
|---|---|
| Citation | 58 & 59 Vict. c. 37 |
| Dates | |
| Royal assent | 6 July 1895 |
The Factory and Workshop Act 1895 was a UK Act of Parliament intended to regulate the conditions, safety, health and wages of people working in factories. It gives an example of the serious problems in UK labour law at the beginning of the 20th century.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain : Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Labour Legislation". Encyclopædia Britannica . Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
 | This United Kingdom-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
A trade union or labor union, often simply referred to as a union, is an organization of workers whose purpose is to maintain or improve the conditions of their employment, such as attaining better wages and benefits, improving working conditions, improving safety standards, establishing complaint procedures, developing rules governing status of employees and protecting and increasing the bargaining power of workers.
Labour laws, labour code or employment laws are those that mediate the relationship between workers, employing entities, trade unions, and the government. Collective labour law relates to the tripartite relationship between employee, employer, and union.
Child labour is the exploitation of children through any form of work that interferes with their ability to attend regular school, or is mentally, physically, socially and morally harmful. Such exploitation is prohibited by legislation worldwide, although these laws do not consider all work by children as child labour; exceptions include work by child artists, family duties, supervised training, and some forms of work undertaken by Amish children, as well as by Indigenous children in the Americas.
A sweatshop or sweat factory is a crowded workplace with very poor or illegal working conditions. The manual workers are poorly paid, work long hours, and experience poor working conditions. Some illegal working conditions include poor ventilation, little to no breaks, inadequate work space, insufficient lighting, or uncomfortably/dangerously high or low temperatures. The work may be difficult, tiresome, dangerous, climatically challenging, or underpaid. Workers in sweatshops may work long hours with unfair wages, regardless of laws mandating overtime pay or a minimum wage; child labor laws may also be violated. Women make up 85 to 90% of sweatshop workers and may be forced by employers to take birth control and routine pregnancy tests to avoid supporting maternity leave or providing health benefits.
Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron Passfield, was a British socialist, economist and reformer, who co-founded the London School of Economics. He was an early member of the Fabian Society in 1884, joining, like George Bernard Shaw, three months after its inception. Along with his wife Beatrice Webb and with Annie Besant, Graham Wallas, Edward R. Pease, Hubert Bland and Sydney Olivier, Shaw and Webb turned the Fabian Society into the pre-eminent politico-intellectual society in Edwardian England. He wrote the original, pro-nationalisation Clause IV for the British Labour Party.
In the United Kingdom, as in other countries, feminism seeks to establish political, social, and economic equality for women. The history of feminism in Britain dates to the very beginnings of feminism itself, as many of the earliest feminist writers and activists—such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Barbara Bodichon, and Lydia Becker—were British.
In the United Kingdom, public holidays are days on which most businesses and non-essential services are closed. Many retail businesses do open on some of the public holidays. There are restrictions on trading on Sundays, Easter Day and Christmas Day in England and Wales and on New Year's Day and Christmas Day in Scotland. Public holidays defined by statute are called "bank holidays", but this term can also be used to include common law holidays, which are held by convention. The term "public holidays" can refer exclusively to common law holidays.
The eight-hour day was a social movement to regulate the length of a working day, preventing excesses and abuses of working time.
Clement Attlee was invited by King George VI to form the Attlee ministry in the United Kingdom in July 1945, succeeding Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The Labour Party had won a landslide victory at the 1945 general election, and went on to enact policies of what became known as the post-war consensus, including the establishment of the welfare state and the nationalisation of some industries. The government's spell in office was marked by post-war austerity measures, the violent crushing of pro-independence and communist movements in Malaya, the grant of independence to India, the engagement in the Cold War against Soviet Communism as well as the creation of the country's National Health Service (NHS).
The Factory Acts were a series of acts passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom beginning in 1802 to regulate and improve the conditions of industrial employment.
The Munitions of War Act 1915 was a British Act of Parliament passed on 2 July 1915 during the First World War. It was designed to maximize munitions output and brought private companies supplying the armed forces under the tight control of the newly created Ministry of Munitions, under David Lloyd George. The policy, according to J. A. R. Marriott, was that:
Life in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution shifted from an agrarian based society to an urban, industrialised society. New social and technological ideas were developed, such as the factory system and the steam engine. Work became more regimented, disciplined, and moved outside the home with large segments of the rural population migrating to the cities.
The History of labour law in the United Kingdom concerns the development of UK 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.
Indian labour law refers to law regulating labour in India. Traditionally, the Indian government at the federal and state levels has sought to ensure a high degree of protection for workers, but in practice, this differs due to the form of government and because labour is a subject in the concurrent list of the Indian Constitution. The Minimum Wages Act 1948 requires companies to pay the minimum wage set by the government alongside limiting working weeks to 40 hours. Overtime is strongly discouraged with the premium on overtime being 100% of the total wage. The Payment of Wages Act 1936 mandates the payment of wages on time on the last working day of every month via bank transfer or postal service. The Factories Act 1948 and the Shops and Establishment Act 1960 mandate 15 working days of fully paid vacation leave and 7 casual leaves each year to each employee, with an additional 7 fully paid sick days. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 gives female employees of every company the right to take 6 months' worth of fully paid maternity leave. It also provides for 6 weeks worth of paid leaves in case of miscarriage or medical termination of pregnancy. The Employees' Provident Fund Organisation and the Employees' State Insurance, governed by statutory acts provide workers with necessary social security for retirement benefits and medical and unemployment benefits respectively. Workers entitled to be covered under the Employees' State Insurance are also entitled to 90 days worth of paid medical leaves. A contract of employment can always provide for more rights than the statutory minimum set rights. The Indian parliament passed four labour codes in the 2019 and 2020 sessions. These four codes will consolidate 44 existing labour laws. They are: The Industrial Relations Code 2020, The Code on Social Security 2020, The Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 and The Code on Wages 2019.
Child labour in Pakistan is the employment of children to work in Pakistan, which causes them mental, physical, moral and social harm. Child labour takes away the education from children. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan estimated that in the 1990s, 11 million children were working in the country, half of whom were under age ten. In 1996, the median age for a child entering the work force was seven, down from eight in 1994. It was estimated that one quarter of the country's work force was made up of children. Child labor stands out as a significant issue in Pakistan, primarily driven by poverty. The prevalence of poverty in the country has compelled children to engage in labor, as it has become necessary for their families to meet their desired household income level, enabling them to afford basic necessities like butter and bread.
The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act 1802, sometimes known as the Factory Act 1802, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom designed to improve conditions for apprentices working in cotton mills. The Act was introduced by Sir Robert Peel, who had become concerned in the issue after a 1784 outbreak of a "malignant fever" at one of his cotton mills, which he later blamed on 'gross mismanagement' by his subordinates.
The working class, or in Marxist terms, the proletariat, includes all employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts. Working-class occupations include blue-collar jobs, and most pink-collar jobs. Members of the working class rely exclusively upon earnings from wage labour; thus, according to more inclusive definitions, the category can include almost all of the working population of industrialized economies, as well as those employed in the urban areas of non-industrialized economies or in the rural workforce.
The labour movement is the collective organisation of working people to further their shared political and economic interests. It consists of the trade union or labour union movement, as well as political parties of labour. It can be considered an instance of class conflict.
Child labour laws are statutes placing restrictions and regulations on the work of minors.
The Factories Act, 1948, as amended by the Factories (Amendment) Act, 1987, served to assist in formulating national policies in India with respect to occupational safety and health in factories and docks in India. It deals with various problems concerning safety, health, efficiency and well-being of the persons at work places. It was replaced by the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020.
