Definition
"Workmen" is the plural of workman — a person engaged in manual or mechanical labor, typically under the direction of an employer or master. In legal usage, the term denotes a class of persons whose employment relationships were historically governed by the law of master and servant, and later by dedicated statutory schemes addressing wages, workplace safety, and compensation for injury.
The term carried particular legal weight in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it served as the operative word in foundational labor legislation. "Workmen" defined the class of persons entitled to protections under truck acts (which required wages to be paid in coin rather than company goods), entitled to organize under trade union legislation, and — most significantly — entitled to recover for workplace injuries under workmen's compensation statutes.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simply the plural of "workman" — persons who perform manual or skilled labor.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "A man employed in labor, whether in tillage or manufactures; a worker; an artificer; a mechanic."
The gap here is one of legal loading. In ordinary speech, "workmen" is an unremarkable occupational descriptor. In law, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century onward, the term became a term of art delimiting a specific statutory beneficiary class. Whether a given person qualified as a "workman" under a particular act — rather than a contractor, domestic servant, or professional — determined eligibility for statutory protections. The common meaning obscures that gatekeeping function entirely.
Common Confusion
"Workmen" is sometimes used interchangeably with "employees" or "servants" in older sources, but the terms are not synonymous in their statutory contexts. "Servant" is the broader common law category; "workman" or "workmen" was frequently defined more narrowly by statute to exclude, for example, domestic servants, agricultural laborers in certain jurisdictions, or persons earning above a specified wage. Researchers should not assume that a source using "servant" and one using "workman" are describing identical legal classes.
Why It Matters in Research
The term's legal significance is almost entirely historical. Modern labor and employment law abandoned "workmen" in favor of gender-neutral terminology — "workers," "employees," or "covered persons" — beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Workmen's compensation statutes across common law jurisdictions were progressively renamed (workers' compensation in the United States; equivalent reforms in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries). Researchers encountering "workmen" in primary sources are almost certainly working with nineteenth or early twentieth century material.
Several traps await researchers in historical sources:
First, the definition of "workmen" varied statute by statute and jurisdiction by jurisdiction. A person covered as a "workman" under the Employers' Liability Act might not qualify under a workmen's compensation act, and vice versa. Never import a statutory definition from one act into analysis of another without confirming the operative definition in the applicable legislation.
Second, Rapalje & Lawrence's entry for this term is a pure cross-reference — directing readers to COMMON EMPLOYMENT, MASTER AND SERVANT, TRADE UNIONS, and TRUCK ACT. This reflects the nineteenth-century treatment of "workmen" not as a standalone legal concept but as a constituent term within several distinct bodies of doctrine. Researchers should follow all four of those cross-references rather than looking for a single unified body of "workmen" law.
Third, the doctrine of common employment (or fellow servant rule) is inseparable from the legal history of workmen. Under that doctrine, a workman injured by the negligence of a fellow workman could not recover from their shared employer. Workmen's compensation legislation was largely designed to abrogate or circumvent this rule. Understanding what "workmen" meant legally is incomplete without understanding common employment.
Fourth, the corpus will contain material from multiple common law jurisdictions — English, American, Canadian, Australian — each of which developed workmen's compensation and related legislation on different timelines and with differently defined beneficiary classes. A source using "workmen" in an English law context is not necessarily describing the same legal category as an American source from the same decade.
Historical Dictionary Support
Rapalje & Lawrence treat "workmen" as a gateway term rather than a subject of definition in its own right, cross-referencing four substantive entries without offering a standalone definition. This is telling: by the time of their dictionary, "workmen" was ubiquitous across multiple fields of law, but its meaning was always derived from — and limited by — the specific statutory or doctrinal context in which it appeared. Historical legal dictionaries generally followed this approach; the term was too context-dependent to admit a universal definition.
What historical sources collectively establish is that "workmen" implied manual or mechanical labor performed under direction, a wage relationship, and — crucially — a subordinate position distinguishing the workman from an independent contractor or professional. The line between workman and independent contractor was actively litigated throughout the relevant period, and historical sources reflect this uncertainty.
Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, "workmen's compensation" has been largely replaced in statutory text and official usage by "workers' compensation," though the older form persists in historical case law and some state code titles. In the United Kingdom, the Workmen's Compensation Acts were eventually superseded by the National Insurance (Industrial Injuries) Act 1946. Researchers should treat jurisdictional context as essential when working with any statutory material using this term.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: MASTER AND SERVANT; COMMON EMPLOYMENT; WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION; TRADE UNIONS; TRUCK ACTS