Page "United Kingdom labour law" Paragraph 4

Labour law in its modern form is primarily a creation of the last three decades of the 20th century.

However, as a system of regulating the employment relationship, labour law has existed since people worked.

In feudal England, the first significant labour laws followed the Black Death.

Given the shortage of workers and consequent price rises the Ordinance of Labourers 1349 and the Statute of Labourers 1351 attempted to suppress sources of wage inflation by banning workers organisation, creating offences for any able-bodied person that did not work, and fixing wages at pre-plague levels.

Ultimately this led to the Peasants ' Revolt of 1381, which was in turn suppressed and followed up with the Statute of Cambridge 1388, which banned workers from moving around the country.

Yet conditions were improving as serfdom was breaking down.

One sign was the beginning of the more enlightened Truck Acts, dating from 1464, that required that workers be paid in cash and not kind.

In 1772 slavery was declared to be illegal in R v Knowles, ex parte Somersett, and the subsequent Slave Trade Act 1807 and Slavery Abolition Act 1833 enforced prohibition throughout the British Empire.

The turn into the 19th century coincided with the start of the massive boom in production.

Gradually people's relationship to their employers moved from one of status-formal subordination and deference-to contract whereby people were formally free to choose their work.

However, freedom of contract did not, as the economist Adam Smith observed, change a worker's factual dependency on employers.