I.nounCOLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a Labour/Democratic/Tory etc majority
▪ Republican majorities were elected in both Houses of Congress that year.
a labour/manpower shortage (=a shortage of people to do work)
▪ During the war, there was a severe labour shortage, so women began doing jobs they had never done before.
a Labour/Republican etc politician
▪ Her mother was a Labour politician.
a Labour/Republican etc seat (=one that a particular party usually wins)
▪ Middlesbrough is one of the safest Labour seats in the country.
a Republican/Democratic/Labour etc candidate
▪ This part of Florida usually supports Republican candidates.
child labourBritish English, child labor American English (= the use of children as workers)
▪ The garments were made using child labour.
division of labour (=the way that particular tasks are shared)
▪ the traditional division of labour between husband and wife
forced labour
▪ Two million suffered imprisonment or forced labour.
hard labour
induce labour
▪ The doctor decided to induce labour.
labour camp
labour exchange
labour force
Labour government
▪ a Labour government
labour market
▪ married women re-entering the labour market
labour movement
Labour MP/candidate
labour painsBritish English, labor pains American English (= felt by a woman at the time she is having a baby)
▪ Becky was at work when labour pains began.
labour pool
▪ The region has a large and talented labour pool.
labour relations
▪ a company with good labour relations
labour the pointBritish English, belabor the point American English (= keep saying something)
▪ I don’t wish to labour the point, but why didn’t you just tell me?
labour/production/transport etc costs
▪ They had to pay £30,000 in legal costs.
manual job/labour/worker etc
▪ low-paid manual jobs
▪ People in manual occupations have a lower life expectancy.
migrant labourBritish English, migrant labor American English (= work done by migrants)
▪ Many farms rely on migrant labour.
mobility of labour (=movement of workers)
▪ There is greater mobility of labour between jobs and areas.
Obama/Labour etc supporters
▪ Most of the newspaper's readers were Labour supporters.
slave labour
staff/labour turnover
▪ a high degree of labour turnover among women
sweated labour
the fruits of my labour (=the results of my hard work)
▪ I’m looking forward to retirement and having time to enjoy the fruits of my labour.
the Labour/Conservative/Social Democratic etc government
▪ In August 1931, the Labour government collapsed.
the Labour/Democratic etc Party
▪ The leadership race within the Republican Party is almost over.
unskilled labour (=people who have no special training)
▪ companies employing unskilled labour
vote Labour
▪ They always vote Labour.
withdraw...labour (=stop working)
▪ Union members will vote on whether to withdraw their labour.
work/labour/toil in obscurity (=work without being well-known)
▪ After years of working in obscurity, his paintings are now hanging in museums.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
casual
▪ He works as a helper on building sites, casual, low-paid labour.
▪ Even in certain labour markets, for example casual day labour, the price of labour can move apparently very freely.
▪ Arrangements were made to obtain contributions from employers of casual labour who might have more than one employer in any week.
▪ Unlike casual labour, skilled workers were heir to a tradition of militancy.
▪ He subsisted on welfare, on charity and on casual labour.
▪ Even now it is the magnet that draws the rural peasants and small businessmen looking for work and casual labour.
▪ It covered predominantly skilled and organized workers while the casual labour problem and that of juvenile labour was untouched.
▪ Moreover they could always use family labour or import casual labour to carry out any essential work.
cheap
▪ An economist would say this is the market working: cheaper labour means more jobs.
▪ One response to this decline in the dynamism of Fordism was the geographical decentralization of production in search of cheaper labour.
▪ It's not another source of free or cheap labour.
▪ It provided employers with a cheap labour force.
▪ The peasant economy provides a reserve of cheap labour for capitalism and so contributes to capital accumulation.
▪ The result was that what had been a small-sized cheap labour force became a large well-paid labour force.
▪ A trend had already been set in textiles, where the comparative advantage of cheap labour was becoming important.
▪ Poorer countries are simply a resource for big business-#cheap labour, cheap dumping grounds, cheap plunder.
domestic
▪ Indeed, there is little differentiation by class at all in domestic divisions of labour.
▪ Housing mirrors the isolated and privatised nature of domestic labour and reinforces each self-contained family unit.
▪ The domestic division of labour Despite the rise in female employment, women today perform the majority of tasks within the household.
▪ At present domestic labour is organisationally inefficient because it is not socialised like the industrial sphere, which counterbalances increased productivity through mechanisation.
▪ Second, women and men have different responsibilities accorded to them in the domestic division of labour.
▪ The onus of domestic labour leads to an abbreviated educational career and thereby reduces women's chances of getting proper wage labour.
▪ Furthermore, the balance of the domestic division of labour does not seem to be related to the work done by men.
▪ The present nature of housing can not be fully understood without relating it to the nature of domestic labour.
female
▪ There is some evidence of modest influences, among many others, of the female labour market on family building patterns.
▪ The increasing division of labour in potting pioneered by Wedgwood also used female labour for patterning and decorating.
▪ Part-time female labour is particularly important.
▪ The basis of flexibility is disproportionately shouldered by female patterns of labour force participation.
▪ These preliminary results suggest the desirability of looking beyond the female labour market for an adequate characterization of economic influences on fertility.
▪ This analysis shows how sensitive these measures are to varying assumptions about unemployment and female labour for Participation.
▪ The guild also contributed regularly to investigations undertaken by the Labour Department of the Board of Trade into female labour.
▪ Until they are, female labour at half rates will have a dangerous effect on the printing trade in general.
forced
▪ It can be argued that forced labour has not ceased but merely changed its form.
▪ These were State enterprises, engineered by the military, and using convict and forced labour.
▪ A forced labour camp, they call it.
▪ Consequently, they were to be subjected to forced labour to pay the equivalent.
▪ They were executed or sentenced to long periods of forced labour.
▪ In 1769 1,375 people were at work on it, many of them prisoners at forced labour.
free
▪ It's not another source of free or cheap labour.
▪ The other thing to note is the cost of parts in deals which offer free labour.
▪ Steps towards free movement of labour have been taken by use of mutual recognition of many vocational qualifications.
▪ Comparative land values indicated the superiority of free labour.
▪ The abolition of serfdom would therefore be a necessary precondition of free labour mobility.
▪ What landlords needed for the booming export economy was better transport, credit, free labour and even machines.
▪ It was considered self-evident that it was in the general national, indeed imperial, interest to move towards free labour.
▪ They applaud the free movement of capital; they abhor the free movement of labour.
hard
▪ And hard labour ... the railway navvies remembered by a rock band.
▪ Charged with obscenity the magistrates gave them six months hard labour each.
▪ Workers who lose their jobs are sent to farm camps, along with bureaucrats doing two weeks' hard labour.
▪ The Vote reported one incident of child assault in Surrey, where a man was sentenced to only four months hard labour.
▪ However, an extra month's hard labour made good the loss.
▪ Theo took a shorter journey-to Wormwood Scrubs, where he did four months' hard labour.
▪ This meant having to work in hard labour, alongside her husband and possibly children, in order to support her family.
▪ The man who refused to take part was court martialled, cashiered and sentenced to a year's hard labour.
manual
▪ This is particularly so for those involved in repetitive, unskilled manual labour.
▪ Action with a scraper and wire brush, using manual labour, would give the desired result.
▪ Women are systematically excluded from top managerial and professional jobs, as well as from skilled manual labour.
▪ He devised a compromise: the most arduous manual labour was eliminated, while safeguarding jobs.
▪ No photographer has better described manual labour in the heavy industries, or the settlements in which these industries are sited.
▪ Workers who once did strenuous manual labour picking wood for the grinders now sit at computer terminals.
▪ The monk's daily routine was to be restored to one of manual labour, study and prayer in equal parts.
▪ At the second stage, consciousness became separated from practical action through the division of mental and manual labour.
skilled
▪ It says it can not get or keep skilled labour.
▪ Bronzes are created by building sand moulds of a plaster original, in itself a skilled and labour intensive job.
▪ In July, 16 % of respondents said lack of skilled labour was likely to limit output.
▪ Chief executive Arno Bohn told me that securing skilled labour for its Stuttgart plant was no problem.
▪ Plants in such areas tend to be less innovative, their technologies are older, and they employ less skilled labour.
▪ Such an economy was highly dependent on a vast mass of skilled labour and a greater horde of the lesser skilled.
▪ Employers also wished to retain skilled labour to recoup their investment in training costs.
▪ Women are systematically excluded from top managerial and professional jobs, as well as from skilled manual labour.
unskilled
▪ That is, where unskilled labour prevailed there was chronic want and deprivation.
▪ If they are wanted at all they are probably wanted in large numbers and to be made in a hurry by unskilled labour.
▪ This is particularly so for those involved in repetitive, unskilled manual labour.
▪ Here over half the total workforce was unskilled, and here resided nearly half the borough's pool of unskilled labour.
▪ The shift from the main traditional occupation, agriculture, to unskilled labour, was considerable.
▪ It was an industrial structure weighted heavily toward the use of semiskilled and unskilled labour.
■ NOUN
camp
▪ The labour camp itself was supplied from the straits.
▪ In the rush not to be left behind, scruples about starvation and labour camps are forgotten.
▪ A forced labour camp, they call it.
▪ Alexander Solzhenitsyn held much of his work in his mind while he was in a labour camp.
▪ The bleak prospect of the labour camps, slavery in Siberia?
▪ Before you know it, you're freezing your boots off in a Siberian labour camp.
▪ It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps.
▪ Thousands of members have since been detained in labour camps.
child
▪ Britain's industrial revolution made ample use of child labour.
▪ He said that we have become complacent about child labour, and that the situation is much worse than it appears.
▪ Ever heard of them using child labour, cutting down the rainforest or destroying local hi-fi shops?
▪ They are close to agreement on one to regulate child labour.
▪ This labour legislation included laws governing female and child labour, improvements in working conditions and social security provisions.
▪ This era of child labour in the factories was the most manifestly exploitative.
▪ There was no concept of industrial safety, no minimum wage, no law against child labour.
cost
▪ The reduction in labour costs has certainly been significant.
▪ Note under this option the labour cost will be nil because labour is currently available but idle.
▪ Throughout the last two decades labour costs have increased, in general, more rapidly than end-product prices.
▪ Those firms within the Community which employ labour illicitly will reduce their labour costs and gain a competitive advantage in production.
▪ Actually, it is rather surprising that the labour cost hasn't gone up more, especially in view of the national rates.
▪ This has gone up in virtually the same proportion as the labour cost.
▪ Low labour costs have resulted in the Far East emerging as a major spectacle-making region of the world.
▪ Commerce will change drastically as materials and labour costs are removed from the equation.
costs
▪ If the growth of labour costs exceeds that of productivity, the profit share is squeezed.
▪ Throughout the last two decades labour costs have increased, in general, more rapidly than end-product prices.
▪ Those firms within the Community which employ labour illicitly will reduce their labour costs and gain a competitive advantage in production.
▪ The beginnings were slow and limited to a few sectors where differences in labour costs were important.
▪ These expenses would be offset by a reduction in unit labour costs.
▪ It is technical advance also which is increasingly removing the natural advantages of countries with low labour costs.
▪ For many companies this can mean a saving of up to 10% per year on energy, maintenance and labour costs.
▪ Devaluation makes an enterprise more competitive by reducing its labour costs measured in foreign currency.
force
▪ Almost three-quarters of the male labour force were manual workers and most of the non-manual workers were shopkeepers and publicans.
▪ Needs are always related back to capitalism's demand for the social reproduction of its labour force.
▪ It creates a cheap labour force, but it's a top-down approach.
▪ By 1986 two-thirds of the labour force worked outside agriculture.
▪ The revolution of 1905 had made plain the disruptive power of the industrial labour force.
▪ This encourages parents to have more children, increasing population growth, impoverishing families and preventing women from joining the labour force.
▪ Both manual and non-manual occupations make up the labour force in service industries.
▪ Success in operation will depend on the goodwill of the labour force as there is a collective rather than personal incentive.
market
▪ Older people who remain active in the formal labour market will be in receipt of earnings from employment.
▪ Central to the research, therefore, is the study of redundancy in the context of how labour markets adjust.
▪ We shall continue to develop our model of the labour market.
▪ It is necessary to abolish this distorting influence on the labour market.
▪ In contrast, discrimination against black students occurs at the initial entry stage into the labour market.
▪ I introduced above the idea of a managerial labour market in the context of the salary package setting procedure.
▪ However, this survey also found that women spent less time out of the labour market rearing children than is often believed.
▪ The Secondary Labour Market An important part of this secondary labour market is composed of what are known as flexible workers.
mobility
▪ The introduction of the Resettlement Transfer Scheme in 1948 was the beginning of post-war labour mobility policies.
▪ Efficiency With labour mobility, inefficiency can arise from fiscal spending in different localities.
▪ Clearly the labour mobility programmes have transferred fewer workers than the number of jobs created by regional policies.
▪ The abolition of serfdom would therefore be a necessary precondition of free labour mobility.
▪ Firstly, harmonisation of national policies, especially in areas where it offers obvious advantages, e.g. labour mobility.
▪ This ties health insurance to employment, which impedes labour mobility and is unfair to the self-employed and unemployed.
▪ This is another indication that regional and labour mobility policies are not always in conflict with each other.
▪ Because labour mobility between industries ensures that wage rates are equated in the two industries.
movement
▪ The policies and attitudes of the autocracy virtually ruled out the emergence of a moderate, reformist labour movement.
▪ They decided to call upon the support of the rank and file of the labour movement.
▪ To remedy this weakness that is the next task before the labour movement.
▪ But later on she did not seem to have any contact with feminist organisations, which the labour movement dismissed as bourgeois.
▪ In the labour movement, Ruiters' concerns have been given concrete expression.
▪ Unemployment was the most important problem facing the labour movement.
▪ In proposing a ban on strikes, the Soviet leadership therefore wished to nip the incipient labour movement in the bud.
▪ Hence, there was considerable tension within the labour movement as to the desirability of state welfare.
shortage
▪ This is no coincidence: accelerated accumulation, combined with labour shortage, was the basic cause of the profits squeeze.
▪ Real wages had to rise somewhere if less efficient plant was to be scrapped and the labour shortage contained.
▪ Boston employers are facing an acute labour shortage with potentially serious consequences for economic growth.
▪ This divergence would be most easily explained by a rising population and a consequent labour shortage.
▪ The money wage increases which workers won exceeded those required to generate enough scrapping to ease labour shortage.
▪ Major problems facing the diversification plan included a lack of infrastructure and a labour shortage.
▪ However, the co-existence of unemployment and labour shortage in different places is a cost to the whole society.
▪ The labour shortage served to drive wages up by 6.4 percent, against productivity growth of only 3.4 percent.
slave
▪ It also mentioned the increasingly documented use of slave labour and the routine torture of prisoners and detainees.
▪ The industry is desperate to shake off the allegation that the chocolate sold in the West may be tainted by slave labour.
▪ The canals linking the city to St Petersburg in the south were built by slave labour in Stalin's days.
▪ An end to child abuse and slave labour?
▪ Boat people, refugee camps, people-smugglers, slave labour and much of the world's poverty are the result.
▪ This was only one of the disadvantages of a slave labour force.
▪ With slave labour they were cheaper to build than it was to provide the necessary lead or bronze piping for alternative means.
▪ Without slave labour the plantations of sugar and cotton could not have been as rapidly developed.
supply
▪ However, we might pause to speculate how the above formulation of the Keynesian labour supply function came about.
▪ Training and Education Inner-city policy has, on the whole, not related to questions of labour supply.
▪ Concern for the welfare of the workers, or labour supply, changed.
▪ During the war, Phillip worked for the government, helping with labour supply for munitions factories.
▪ Suppose that the labour supply function has the form.
▪ In contrast, this ratio does not seem to have played much of a direct role in explaining rising aggregate labour supply.
▪ It all depends on the elasticity of labour supply.
▪ Capital shortage was a closely inter-related problem with labour supply.
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
labouring class/family etc
▪ Although in other poems Leapor shows that labouring class women can be desperately unhappy in marriage, she is not unequivocal.
▪ Day schooling was received by only a minority of children from the labouring classes, in some parishes a very tiny one.
▪ Even 2 out of every 3 farm labouring families stayed put and overall 3 out of every 4 households remained virtually the same.
▪ For the most part, however, the labouring classes did not move very far.
▪ His poetry often depicts labouring class life vividly.
▪ Relatively little attention has been paid to the origins of labouring class poetry.
▪ Stephen Duck, however, is not the first instance of a labouring class poet in the eighteenth century.
▪ The claims made for these poems, however, reveal some of the difficulties in a discussion of labouring class poetry.
prison/labour/detention etc camp
▪ A forced labour camp, they call it.
▪ All the Luftwaffe crews who've ended up in Ireland have been put in prison camps.
▪ Even so there remain causes for concern in the Labour camp.
▪ I was in a friendly country and was less effectively guarded than I ever would be in a prison camp.
▪ More than 13,000 boat people in three Hong Kong detention camps demonstrated against forced repatriation on Nov. 11-12.
▪ Of these, 55,000 were to be punished either by receiving prison sentences or by being sent to labour camps.
▪ The men were unloaded in the reception area at Long Kesh Detention Camp and placed in cubicles.
▪ Then he was chosen, with another senior officer, to run the Athi River Detention Camp.
the Labour/Conservative/Green etc vote
▪ Although the Labour vote was still six million, its numbers were lower than at any time since 1910.
▪ But anti-Tory feeling in a recession-battered area has polarised the Labour vote to his disadvantage.
▪ But the Green vote has disintegrated.
▪ Her great threat to the Howard government is to split the conservative vote three ways.
▪ The ardent left-winger helped launch the Red Wedge pop-meets-politics movement to boost the Labour vote in the 1987 general election.
the job/labour market
▪ And the labour market is the invisible global bazaar where survival-life itself-is traded for work.
▪ By focusing on wage profiles it is possible to show contrasts between different segments of the labour market.
▪ For some who can work, corporate downsizing and increased competition in the job market have led to self-employment.
▪ How do I re-enter the job market after being a full-time mom?
▪ However as she grows older, and perhaps re-enters the labour market, domestic tasks are shared more equitably.
▪ I first entered the job market more than 30 years ago.
▪ In particular, the real wage will adjust spontaneously soas to prevent the emergence of excess supply in the labour market.
▪ This trend is likely to continue, restructuring the job market into two distinct tiers.
the labour movement
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Large-scale growth in this type of farming is limited by the climate and the high cost of labour.
▪ Many women do all the work in the home, and their labour is unpaid.
▪ Marx defined the working class as people who sell their labour to employers.
▪ One of the horses had gone into labour while the farmer was away.
▪ Our produce prices cannot compete with those of Spain, with its cheap labour and sunshine.
▪ The labour force is growing at a rate of 4% a year.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Deskilling is symptomatic of the way in which a worker's labour is taken possession of by the capitalist.
▪ His Milton and Dante fetch pathetically small sums in comparison with the labour and skill they cost.
▪ In practice, the conditions for perfectly competitive labour and product markets do not apply.
▪ Overaccumulation meant there was insufficient labour to keep old plants going, so they had to be scrapped.
II.verbCOLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
over
▪ Every Noisegate hallucination has clearly been meticulously laboured over.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Sheffield is a city where steel-workers once laboured in their thousands.
▪ Shipman was seated in his office, labouring over his paperwork, when I came in.
▪ The goal was just what the team needed, at the end of a game in which they had laboured hard to overcome Chelsea.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ At the bottom of the scale, the majority were untouchables, labouring on the land.
▪ Because I feel any attachment to this city or this world where I have laboured?
▪ From Sunday lunch-time to breakfast today, their mountain of prevaricating committees have laboured without bringing forth even a mouse.
▪ She rested now and then under the shade of the cypresses and watched other tourists labouring in the heat.
▪ You have laboured up an unending hill with heavy feet which are swollen, sore and tired.