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Labor history refers to the political, social and legal struggle, working people, in their collective demands for fairer and more humane treatment from their employers and the social law. The cultural and philosophical culimation of previous labor struggles are codified as labor rights and labor law.
Working-class people, by definition, have always been those in society who struggle more to survive, relative to those in who have wealth. The social divide between rich and poor began with civilization, and the attribution of wealth and ownership tends to be intertwined and interchangeable with social position. The social divide is analogous to the master and slave relationship, and it is this balance from which springs much of the current social order. The social need for administration by an authority by nature had to be balanced by the ruler's understanding of and attention to the needs of his subjects, or a natural social revolt would manifest. Much of this balance between ruler and ruled remained, from Mesopotamian kings to feudalist Lords in Europe, until the European discovery of the New World.
1 America as the catalyst for worker rights philosophy
Current labor history is generally thought to have its philosophical groundwork in the Protestant Reformation. The birth of the United StatesThe United States of America also referred to as the United States U. America ¹ or the States is a federal republic in central North America, stretching from the Atlantic in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west. It shares land borders with Canada in, fueled by the corporateA corporation is a legal entity (distinct from a natural person) that often has similar rights in law to those of a natural person. Civil law systems may refer to corporations as "moral persons;" they may also go by the name "SA" (anonymous society) or so-controlled colonizationColonization sometimes colonisation is the act, by a militarily strong country, of invading and taking over the sovereignty of another area, which then becomes known as a colony''. This often includes the establishment of one or more settlements, also cal of the Americas, promised new hope and opportunity for Europeans, and laid the material basis for the development of a new society, based on more egalitarian principles.
While the mass immigration of Europeans to America had dire consequencesThe term ethnic cleansing refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of another ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually indistinguishable from forced emigration and population transfer, while at the other it merges with depor for Native Americans, it also fueled the development of new directions in thinking about the governments under which people lived. On the simple promise of land ownership for ordinary European peasants, the Americas were quickly colonized under the land incentive system.
The rapid philosophical developments in America would have effects in European and Asian societies as well, spawning the development of communism and socialism, which attempted to address the widespread popular desire of peoples to attempt to change the social order in existing well-populated countries —a much different situation than that faced by Europeans in the sparsely populated New World.
The history of the United States, from the point of view of the administrating powers, had always been a delicate balance between the property rights of landlords and the desires of peasant workers —the Revolutionary War changed only the administration, not the land-incentive system itself. Soon, as American societies developed, the need for the owner classes to be accommodating to the working classes diminished, and the same type of social divide present in European feudalism, became firmly established in America. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, came the use of people as mere components in the production process, and over time, small and disorganized protests began to coalesce into an ordered defiance to the new corporate government, whose means and abuses resembled those that caused people to leave Europe.
