Columbia Encyclopedia

(Encyclopedia) labor union: see union, labor.

(Encyclopedia) union, labor, association of workers for the purpose of improving their economic status and working conditions through collective bargaining with employers. Historically there have been two chief type...

(Encyclopedia) labor law, legislation dealing with human beings in their capacity as workers or wage earners. The Industrial Revolution, by introducing the machine and factory production, greatly expanded the class ...

(Encyclopedia) company union: see union, labor. ...

(Encyclopedia) trade union: see union, labor.

(Encyclopedia) industrial union, labor union composed of all the workers in a given industry, regardless of skill, craft, or occupation (as opposed to the craft union, in which all members are of one skill, such as ...

(Encyclopedia) migrant labor, term applied in the United States to laborers who travel from place to place harvesting crops that must be picked as soon as they ripen. Although migrant labor patterns exist in other p...

(Encyclopedia) Taft-Hartley Labor Act, 1947, passed by the U.S. Congress, officially known as the Labor-Management Relations Act. Sponsored by Senator Robert Alphonso Taft and Representative Fred Allan Hartley, the ...

(Encyclopedia) National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), independent agency of the U.S. government created under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act), and amended by the acts of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Labo...

(Encyclopedia) labor, term used both for the effort of performing a task and for the workers engaged in the activity. In ancient times much of the work was done by slaves (see slavery). In the feudal period agricult...