Introduction

Industrialization requires major adaptations and readjustments of the labouring population. The workers drawn into industry must learn not only new skills and techniques, they must also become accustomed to new rhythms and hours of work and submit to new forms of discipline and control. Typically, they must also change their habitual styles of life and their customary environments. All of these changes tend to involve considerable economic and psychological hardships, against which the workers seek to protect themselves. The present chapter is an historical survey of the responses of governments in the major industrial countries of the continent to the problems faced by industrial labour and to the workers' organized efforts to improve their situation. If industrialization created a need for workers to combine for the defence of their interests, it also improved their capability to create common-interest organizations. But the collective actions of workers in the form of strikes, trade unions, and political movements represented an economic threat to employers as well as a challenge to the prevailing system of power and authority. In a broader sense, the inevitable strife was a threat to economic efficiency and to social stability. The basic historical task of labour policy was therefore to provide the means and institutions which would meet the essential demands of the workers and at the same time promote efficiency and preserve law and order. Over time, labour policy necessarily mirrored the changing balance of economic and social forces and was articulated in ways which reflected the ideological commitments of the engaged parties.