Word Finder - labourers

definition

One who uses body strength instead of intellectual power to earn a wage, usually hourly.

The first importation of Chinese labourers was in 1852.

By a further act of 1541 - which was not repealed until 1845 - artificers, labourers, apprentices, servants and the like were forbidden to play bowls at any time save Christmas, and then only in their master's house and presence.

Since the abolition of slavery immigration has poured a large number of labourers into the coffee-producing states, and with beneficial results.

A considerable percentage of these arrivals and departures represents seasonal labourers, who come out from Europe solely for the Argentine wheat harvest and should not be classed as immigrants.

In many towns most of the skilled labourers and a great many of the unskilled (for instance, the grain-porters at Odessa and elsewhere) are Jews.

Finally, in the Baltic provinces nearly all the land belongs to the German landlords, who either farm the land themselves, with hired labourers, or let it in small farms. Only one-fourth of the peasants are farmers, the remainder being mere labourers, who are emigrating in great numbers.

The remedy they proposed was that the labourers should be prohibited from migrating from one estate to another, and an order to that effect was issued, with the result that the peasants, being no longer able to change their domicile and seek new employers, fell practically under the unlimited power of the proprietors on whose land they resided.

The years 1830-1833 are especially memorable for a disastrous outbreak of sheep-rot and for agrarian outrages, caused partly by the dislike of the labourers to the introduction of agricultural machines.

A large number of agricultural labourers were thus only in partial employment, and their withdrawal from the land was of minor importance as compared with the shrinkage in the number of those permanently employed.

The men are well known all over Spain and Portugal as hardy, honest and industrious, but for the most part somewhat unskilled, labourers; indeed the word Gallego has come to be almost a synonym in Madrid for a "hewer of wood and drawer of water."

The Lepchas are also the ordinary out-door labourers on the hills.

The aborigines, Sheng fan, or " wild savages," deserved the appellation in some respects, for they lived by the chase and had little knowledge even of husbandry; while the Chinese themselves, uneducated labourers, acknowledged no right except that of might.

Those employed in workshops, whose overseers were themselves most commonly of servile status, had probably a harder lot than domestics; and the agricultural labourers were not unfrequently chained, and treated much in the same way as beasts of burden.

We have seen that free persons had all along been to some extent employed in the cultivation of land as hired labourers, and, as we shall presently find, also as tenants on the great estates.

Thus, out of every lot of 100 shipped from Africa 17 died in about 9 weeks, and not more than 50 lived to be effective labourers in the islands.

In parts where European authority remained weak, as in the hinterland of the Portuguese province of Angola and the adjacent regions of Central Africa, native potentates continued to raid their neighbours, and from this region many labourers were (up to 1910) forcibly taken to work on the cocoa plantation in St Thomas.

Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola (Haiti), who had exhausted the labour of that island, turned his thoughts to the Bahamas, and in 1509 Ferdinand authorized him to procure labourers from these islands.

The introduction of European immigrants dates from 1818 when a Swiss colony was located at Nova Friburgo, near Rio de Janeiro, and it was continued under the direction and with the aid of the imperial government down to the creation of the republic. Since then the state governments have assumed charge of immigration, and some of them are spending large sums in the acquisition of labourers.

In some of the coffee districts these contracts have resulted very profitably to the Italian labourers.

The same infatuated passion for mining speculation which had characterized the Spanish settlers in South America now began to actuate the Portuguese; labourers and capital were drained off to the mining districts, and Brazil, which had hitherto in great measure supplied Europe with sugar, sank before the competition of the English and French.

The sugar industry soon became of importance, and the planters were compelled to seek for large numbers of labourers.

Servants, in the widest sense of the word, apprenticed workmen and agricultural labourers are carefully excluded.

The discontent of the rural labourers and of the poorer class of craftsmen in the towns, caused by the economic distress that followed the Black Death and the enactment of the Statute of Labourers in 1351, was brought to a head by the imposition of a poll tax in 1379 and again in 1381, and at the end of May in the latter year riots broke out at Brentwood in Essex; on the 4th of June similar violence occurred at Dartford; and on the 6th a mob several thousands strong seized the castle of Rochester and marched up the Medway to Maidstone.

His second administration, of which the main achievement was the extension of the suffrage to the agricultural labourers, was harassed by two controversies, relating to Ireland and Egypt, which proved disastrous to the Liberal party.

South, east and west of the city are the gold mines, indicated by tall chimneys, battery houses and the compounds of the labourers.

The compounds in general, especially those originally made for Chinese labourers, are well built, comfortable, and fulfil every hygienic requirement.

The natives, a mixed Polynesian and Melanesian people of Samoan speech, are the most industrious in the Pacific, and many of the young men go as labourers to other islands.

Miserably poor, they subsist for the most part by selling firewood or other products of their jungle; but a few of them have patches of cultivated land, and many earn wages as day labourers to the Hindus.

Occupation.-The immigrants are for the most part unskilled labourers.

The "miscellaneous" are day labourers.

The majority of the immigrants are adult males and farm labourers.

This temporary emigration is strongest in the spring, and consists principally of adult males (agriculturists, farm and day labourers, bricklayers and masons) in search of work.

It resembles somewhat the movement of Irish labourers into Great Britain at harvest time.

This at least is the excuse for the entire exclusion of Chinese labourers from the United States since 1882 (provisions made more severe in 1888 and 1892) (see also the article Co01.IE).

In the cause of labour he was active for many years, and in 1872 he set an example to the clergy of all the churches by taking a prominent part in a meeting held in Exeter Hall on behalf of the newly established Agricultural Labourers' Union, Joseph Arch and Charles Bradlaugh being among those who sat with him on the platform.

Desperate, but not very successful, efforts were made to enforce the statute of Labourers, of 1351, by which it was sought to maintain prices and wages as they had been before the pestilence.

He published essays on the way to destroy mendicancy and to improve the condition of the labourers, and also on the establishment of a fund for rural relief and the organization of rural education.

In comparison with its other industries it stands also pre-eminently as an agricultural state; for of its 789,404 labourers in 1900, 371,604, or 47%, were engaged in agriculture, 129,006 being engaged in trade and transportation, and 124,803 in manufactures and mechanical pursuits.

But the Torres Straits islanders are employed by Europeans in the pearl shell fishery, and are good labourers; and in some of the Kei and Aru Islands the Papuan inhabitants form orderly Christian communities.

Various other public services, including even common labourers of the larger towns, are rapidly passing under civil service regulation.

It was begun in 1607 - a year when the city was completely flooded - but was not completed until 1789, and then it was found that the city was still subject to partial inundations, although an enormous sum of money and 70,000 lives of Indian labourers had been expended upon it.

C - Under the head of administration would be classed the chief director of the arsenal, officials military and civil, non-commissioned officers and military artificers, civilian foremen, workmen and labourers, with the clerks and writers necessary for the office work of the establishments.

He started work at the age of seven in a ropeworks, attending the wheel of a rope-spinner for ten hours a day, and on Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings toiled in a barber's shop. He afterwards became a gasworker, and in 1889 he helped to found the National Union of Gas Workers and General Labourers, becoming its general secretary.

The government has aided immigrant farmers and farm labourers having a certain sum of money, also female domestics, by paying part of their passage money.

Soldiers are for him not merely unproductive labourers, as Smith called them; they are rather "destructive labourers."

A homestead to the value of $1000 which is owned and occupied by the head of a family is exempt from attachment or forced sale except for debts secured by mechanics', labourers', materialmen's or vendors' liens upon the premises.

The family soon removed to West Haven, Vermont, where, all working together, they made a scanty living as day labourers.

Recognized causes for divorce are adultery, extreme cruelty, wilful desertion, wilful neglect, habitual intemperance or conviction for felony, The homestead of a head of a family consisting either of a farm not exceeding 160 acres or $2500 in value, or of a house and lot - the lot not exceeding 4 acre, and the house and lot not exceeding $2500 in value - is secured against debtors except in case of judgments obtained before the homestead was recorded as such, in case of labourers', mechanics' or vendors' liens, and in case of a debt secured by mortgage; if the owner is a married person the homestead cannot be mortgaged without the consent of both husband and wife.

For the settlement of disputes between labourers and employers there is a state board, appointed by the governor and consisting of an employer of labour, a labourer and a disinterested citizen.

It is true that this mostly happened at the expense of the German industrial communities, since the Slav labourers as immigrants acquired schools in their own language.