Labourers.

Labourers. The only peculiar laws affecting labourers are where they come within the description of 'workmen' given in the Employers and Workmen Act, 1875. The act defines 'workman' as 'any person who, being a labourer, servant in husbandry, journeyman, artificer, handicraftsman, miner, or otherwise engaged in manual labour, whether under the age of twenty-one years or above that age, has entered into or works under a contract with an employer.' The act provides such labourers a speedy, easy, and cheap mode of recovering their wages when the amount is small, and affords masters an easy method of correcting misdemeanours and ill-behaviour on the part of the workmen. Labourers' wages are prohibited from being paid in kind or with goods by the Truck Act (q.v.). Other measures affecting labourers are the Factory Acts (q.v.), the extension of the franchise (see PARLIAMENT), the establishment of national Education (q.v.); the Workmen's Compensation Act, 1897 (see LIABILITY OF EMPLOYERS); see also the articles ALLOTMENTS, GANGS, TRADES-UNIONS, MASTER AND SERVANT. Numbers of Irish labourers still come over to England and Scotland at harvest time, returning again when harvest is ended. Italians to the number of 87,000 annually leave their homes for unskilled labour (as on railway laying) in Austria, Germany, and France. A prominent feature in the social economy of several Russian provinces (Samara, Saratoff, Yaroslav, Vyatka) is the large annual migration of their male population to work in more populous centres of Russia as smiths, masons, plasterers, carpenters, boatmen, gardeners, &c. For description of the condition of English agricultural labourers, see books by Jefferies (q.v.), Heath's English Peasantry (1874) and Peasant Life in the West of England (1880), and Jessopp's Arcady (1887).