5. Legal regulation of labour relations

The regulation of the employment relation requires both collective regulation through

free collective bargaining between the employer and the trade union, with the

appropriate legal protection for trade union rights, and direct legislative intervention

to determine the minimum acceptable labour standards for those employees who do

not have the capacity to organise in the face of the overwhelming power of their

employers.

Different systems of labour legislation provide a different balance between trade

union and legislative regulation of the employment relation, but these are

complementary rather than alternative forms of regulation. On the one hand,

collective bargaining is most effective when it is conducted on the basis of cert ain

minimum legal standards. On the other hand, trade unions are the most effective

channel for the enforcement of labour legislation.

Labour relations law (collective labour law): these are the legal provisions which regulate the structure, function and organisation of industry-wide (trade union law) and in-company employee representatives (in-company

industrial relations law).

6. Development and scope of labour law

Labour law has won recognition as a distinctive branch of the law within the academic legal community, but the extent to which it is recognized as a separate branch of legal practice varies widely depending partly on the extent to which there is a labour code or other distinctive body of labour legislation in the country concerned, partly on the extent to which there are separate labour courts or tribunals, and partly on the extent to which an influential group within the legal profession practice specifically as labour lawyers.

In the early phases of development the scope of labour law is often limited to the most developed and important industries, to undertakings above a certain size, and to wage earners; as a general rule, these limitations are gradually eliminated and the scope of the law extended to include handicrafts, rural industries and agriculture, small undertakings, office workers, and, in some countries, public employees. Thus, a body of law originally intended for the protection of manual workers in industrial enterprises is gradually transformed into a broader body of legal principles and standards, which have basically two functions: the protection of the worker as the weaker party in the employment relationship, and the regulation of the relations between organized interest groups (industrial relations).

7. The first landmark of modern labour law

The first landmark of modern labour law was the British Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802. By 1848 the first legal limitation of the working hours of adults was adopted by the Landsgemeinde (citizens’ assembly) of the Swiss canton of Glarus. Sickness insurance and workmen’s compensation were pioneered by Germany in 1883 and 1884, and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes was introduced in New Zealand in the 1890s. The more industrialized states of the United States began to enact such legislation toward the end of the 19th century, but the bulk of the present labour legislation of the United States was not adopted until after the Depression of the 1930s. There was virtually no labour legislation in Russia prior to the October Revolution of 1917. In India children between the ages of seven and 12 were limited to nine hours of work per day in 1881 and adult males in textile mills to 10 hours per day in 1911, but the first major advance was the amendment of the Factory Act in 1922 to give effect to conventions adopted at the first session of the International Labour Conference at Washington, D.C., in 1919. In Japan rudimentary regulations on work in mines were introduced in 1890. Labour legislation in Latin America began in Argentina in the early years of the century and received a powerful impetus from the Mexican Revolution, which ended in 1917, but, as in North America, the trend became general only with the impact of the Great Depression. In Africa the progress of labour legislation became significant only from the 1940s onward.