The difficult life of the landless labourer found ample echo in the arts.

He focused on developing efficient distribution and management systems, determined that small farmers and landless labourers should own the process of milk production for themselves.

Enclosure faced a great deal of popular resistance because of its effects on the household economies of smallholders and landless labourers.

The poorest agricultural workers were the landless labourers, who worked on the land of other farmers.

Those who remained sank to the status of landless labourers.

The cause could be millions of migrant labourers returning home to their villages.

And the committee will say low-skilled workers in particular have suffered from competition with migrant labourers willing to take less pay.

Millions of migrant labourers in the region endure gruelling conditions and few rights, bonded to their employers or to shady intermediary sponsors.

Contractors often opt for shoddy materials to cut costs, officials turn a blind eye in return for kickbacks and cheap migrant labourers are given little or no safety training.

The surrounding areas are inhabited by slum dwellers, truckers and migrant labourers.

There was plenty of food around but rural labourers had seen a decline in their legal rights.

Not just rural labourers, but weavers and miners, watchmakers and stocking-makers were poachers, the village alehouse was the recruiting centre, the local innkeeper and the coachman the distributors.

Provincial statistics on the movement of tens of millions of rural labourers into the country's cities — the biggest migration in history — are notoriously prone to political pressure and manipulation.

On the embankment between the upper and the lower road a group of unemployed rural labourers are sleeping in uneasy postures.

Wages continued to rise, and between the 1340s and the 1380s the purchasing power of rural labourers increased by around 40 percent.

In construction there are simply not enough skilled labourers.

With overtime and bonuses, many experienced skilled labourers have been able to comfortably gross at least 50,000 a year for several years.

This has been driven by a growing wage bill as a chronic shortage of skilled labourers, such as bricklayers, pushes pay higher.

Councils blamed delays in repairs to flood-hit homes on a shortage of skilled labourers.

Unlike the more traditional designed, these required expensive skilled labourers and could only be built slowly over many seasons.

The decrease was driven by cuts to unskilled labourers and non-university students who would have gone to dubious colleges, he said.

Increasing mechanisation has meant the number of unskilled labourers has dwindled as they are replaced by skilled staff.

For hedging, ditching and other arduous tasks unskilled labourers were hired at tenpence a day.

The pay of agricultural workers and unskilled labourers had outstripped that of the police.

There was also a group of unskilled labourers who worked wherever there was a need.