Tricky Words in this week's OVI

Labor (labour is the British English spelling) comes directly from the Latin word for physical work, the kind of work which supplies the everyday needs of the community, originally tilling the fields, transporting goods, building things. So in English it quickly developed undertones of hard work (toil), physical effort (exertion), and suffering (for a woman, going into labor means starting the last, painful part of childbirth). If you do something laboriously, it means with unnecessary effort, for example cleaning something, or playing the piano, or even explaining something to someone. Hard labor used to mean the kind of prison sentence which the convicts would spend breaking rocks in a quarry or digging out coal down a mine.

Andy's Wordshop

Employment on the other hand means to be involved in some activity, not always physical work, and with the growth of factories the employer-employee relationship was formalized. Laborers continued to do the most simple physical work, say (povedzme) on farms or bulding sites, which was also often seasonal work. The Labour Party which started in Britain in the 1920s intended to improve workers' conditions through politics. They deliberately chose the name Labour, because by getting into Parliament they could raise the status of the word and thus also of workers themselves. There's a similar idea in the Labor Unions. The (British) Trade(s) Unions took their name from the trades (remeslá) of the old guilds (cechy).