Law and Labor Rights

Abstract

This chapter addresses the long-standing, inextricable relationship of labor and the law. Labor law, both as a set of positive laws and state institutions aimed at protecting and regulating labor, and as an autonomous field of law, has its historical origins in the Western world at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, the regulation of work (understood in a broad sense, as a task that someone does for another, regardless of whether she does it freely or because she is bound by some kind of subjection), whether through written laws or conventions sanctioned by custom, is almost as old as work itself. The purpose of this chapter is to review the history of the development of labor law in Latin America from colonial times to the present, with a special focus on the peak period of that development, in the first half of the twentieth century.