Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Law of the Employment of Labor A recognized pressing need of the social organization is the securing of safe and wholesome conditions of work and an ad justment of the relations of employer and employed in the light of their mutual and reciprocal rights and interests, so that there shall be neither undue advantages nor undue burdens on either side. It is not many years since such legal provision as existed was embodied solely in the common law, that body of customs and adjudications that had come to have the sanction of the courts of England and America to such an extent that it became a clog to any progressive adjustment of law to changing eco nomic conditions. Clearly a policy shaped in the days of the hand loom and forge and transportation by horse power could poorly provide for the needs of industry to - day. The common law reduced to a codified form is printed as an appendix to this volume, and sufficient evidence of its inadequacy is afforded if this code is compared with the scores of statutes compiled in the fifteen-hundred-page volume of labor laws, forming the Twenty second Annual Report of the United States Commissioner of Labor, presenting the enactments of the legislatures of the various states in their attempt to prescribe the respective rights and duties and to safeguard the physical and economic interests of the parties to the labor contract. There is a feeling, only too well founded, that, despite legislation, the dead hand of outgrown doctrines of the common law restrains the courts in their con struction of statutes; but that there is encouraging advance in this respect cannot be gainsaid. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.