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Article: Labor Legislation and Administration
- Article from:
- Dictionary of American History
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LABOR LEGISLATION AND ADMINISTRATION
LABOR LEGISLATION AND ADMINISTRATION.
Labor legislation in America has gone through four distinct periods. Before the late nineteenth century, legislative intervention in the master-servant relationship had been extremely rare and episodic, and common law and court policy had long prevailed as the dominant legal framework. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (especially during the Progressive Era), waves of protective labor legislation swept across the country, providing industrial workers with some protection against flagrantly unfair and inhumane labor practices by employers. Then during the 1930s, labor legislation began ...