Definition
A person who labors for another, typically under a contract of employment or service. In legal usage, "workman" denotes an employed laborer — someone performing work on behalf of an employer in exchange for compensation — as distinguished from an independent contractor or a person working on their own account.
The term carries particular weight in statutory contexts. Workers' compensation legislation, factory acts, and occupational safety statutes historically used "workman" as a term of art defining who fell within a scheme's coverage. Whether a given individual qualified as a "workman" under such statutes determined access to compensation, benefits, and legal protections — making the precise statutory definition crucial to legal analysis.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A man who labors for wages; also, an artisan or craftsman.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A man employed in labor, whether in tillage or manufactures; a worker; hence, especially, a skillful artificer or laborer.
The common meaning and the legal meaning overlap substantially in ordinary cases but diverge where it matters most. Common usage describes any laboring person without legal consequence. The legal meaning triggered or excluded specific rights and obligations — particularly under workers' compensation statutes and master-servant doctrine — depending on whether the facts fit a jurisdictionally specific statutory or common-law definition. A highly skilled professional or a domestic servant might be a "workman" in ordinary speech but fall outside the statutory definition entirely.
Common Confusion
Workman is sometimes used interchangeably with employee, servant, and laborer, but these are not synonyms in all legal contexts. "Servant" is the common-law category from master-and-servant doctrine; "employee" is the modern statutory category; "laborer" often denotes manual or unskilled work specifically. A workman may or may not be a servant under the common law, and may or may not be an "employee" as defined in a given statute. Researchers should not assume that a source using one of these terms intends the others.
Why It Matters in Research
The term "workman" is a marker of historical legal texts. It dominated labor and employment law vocabulary through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and appears extensively in workers' compensation statutes, factory inspection acts, employer's liability legislation, and master-and-servant treatises of that period. Modern statutes have largely replaced "workman" with "employee," so a researcher moving between historical and contemporary sources must track this terminological shift carefully.
The statutory meaning of "workman" varied significantly by jurisdiction and by act. Many early workers' compensation schemes excluded domestic servants, farm laborers, casual workers, or employees of small establishments — all of whom might colloquially be called workmen. Whether an injury victim was a "workman" within the act was frequently the central litigation issue. When consulting historical statutory materials, researchers must identify the operative statutory definition rather than relying on dictionary definitions.
Bouvier's cross-reference to MASTER AND SERVANT is the essential doctrinal connection: the rights and duties of workmen were largely governed by master-and-servant common law until displaced by statute. Tracing a legal question about a "workman" in sources predating roughly 1900 almost always requires engaging that doctrine.
Researchers should also be alert to gender-specific drafting. The historical term "workman" was male-gendered on its face. Later legislation and judicial interpretation sometimes extended coverage to women; sometimes separate provisions governed female workers. Modern equivalents — "worker," "employee" — are facially gender-neutral. This shift matters when analyzing coverage disputes in historical materials.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionary sources agree completely and tersely: a workman is one who labors, or one employed to do business for another. Bouvier alone adds the cross-reference to MASTER AND SERVANT, which is the more instructive signal for legal research — it locates "workman" within the dominant common-law framework governing employment relationships at the time of writing.
None of the historical sources engages the statutory complexity that gave the term its real legal content. They reflect the term's general meaning rather than its operative legal definition in any particular scheme. This is a gap researchers should note: the dictionary definitions are a starting point, not a sufficient guide to statutory interpretation.
Jurisdictional Note
Statutory definitions of "workman" were not uniform. English workers' compensation legislation — particularly the Workmen's Compensation Act 1897 and its successors — shaped early American state statutes, but American jurisdictions modified coverage categories significantly. Researchers working across jurisdictions should identify the specific statutory definition in force at the relevant time and place rather than assuming portability.