Labor
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence · Benjamin Vaughan Abbott · 1879
Dictionary of Terms and Phrases Used in American or English Jurisprudence
In its vernacular sense of work, service of the more onerous and inferior kind, labor is often used in statutes, such as laws forbidding labor on Sunday, laws giving a lien or privileged remedy for wages of labor, &c., some of which have given rise to decisions on the meaning of the word. See also Business. Labor, business, and work are not synonymes. Labor may be business, but it is not necessarily so; and business is not always labor. Labor implies toil; exertion producing weariness; manual exertion of a toilsome nature. Making an agreement for the sale of a chattel is not within a prohibition of common labor upon Sunday, though it is (if by a merchant in his calling) within a prohibition upon business. Bloom V. Eichards, 2 Ohio St. 387. whether physical or mental, or whether the main ingredient was manual toil or professional or other skill; but, in its narrower and popular signification, it is restricted to claims arising from physical toil.
Weymouth V. Sanborn, 43 N. H. 171.
The official services of a mayor of a city, under an annual salary, were deemed embraced in the term labor, in Robinson a.
Aiken, 39 N. H. 211.
A statute providing that any person who shall perform any labor in building a house shall have a lien for the value of such labor, does not include services rendered by an architect in superintending the erection of the building; and he is not entitled to a lien for the value of such services.
Stryker v, Cassidy, 17 N. Y. Supreme Ct. 18.