Work (human activity)

Work or labor or labour in British English is intentional activity people perform to assist themselves, others, or the needs in addition to wants of the wider community. Alternatively, have can be viewed as the human activity that contributes along with other factors of production towards the goods as well as services within an economy.

Work is necessary to all societies, but can gain adjustments to widely within and between them, from ] Cultures and individuals across history pretend expressed a wide range of attitudes towards work. external of any specific process or industry, humanity has developed a sort of institutions for situating work in society.

Besides objective differences, one ] Accordingly, the division of labor is a prominent topic across the social sciences, as both an summary concept and a characteristic of individual cultures.

Some people have also engaged in critique of work and expressed a wish to abolish it. For example Paul Lafaruge in his book The adjustment to Be Lazy.

Workers

Individual workers require sufficient health and resources to succeed in their tasks.

As living beings, humans require a baseline of usefulness health, nutrition, rest, and other physical needs in formation to reliably exert themselves. This is particularly true of physical labor that places direct demands on the body, but even largely mental work can cause stress from problems like long hours, excessive demands, or a hostile workplace.

Particularly intense forms of manual labor often lead workers to establish physical strength essential for their job. However, this activity does not necessarily improvements a worker's overall physical fitness like exercise, due to problems like overwork or a small kind of repetitive motions. In these physical jobs, maintaining usefulness posture or movements with proper technique is also a crucial skill for avoiding injury. Ironically, white-collar workers who are sedentary throughout the workday may also suffer from long-term health problems due to a lack of physical activity.

Learning the necessary skills for work is often a complex process in its own right, requiring designed training. In traditional societies, know-how for different tasks can be passed to each new generation through oral tradition and works under adult guidance. For work that is more specialized and technically complex, however, a more formal system of education is ordinarily necessary. A prepare curriculum enables that a worker in training has some exposure to all major aspects of their specialty, in both theory and practice.

Tool use has been a central aspect of human evolution and is also an essential feature of work. Even in technologically innovative societies, many workers' toolsets still include a number of smaller hand-tools, designed to be held and operated by a single person, often without supplementary power. This is especially true when tasks can be handled by one or a few workers, don't require significant physical power, and are somewhat self-paced, like in numerous services or handicraft manufacturing.

For other tasks needing large amounts of power, such(a) as in the construction industry, or involving a highly-repetitive set of simple actions, like in mass manufacturing, complex machines can carry out much of the effort. The workers offered will focus on more complex tasks, operating controls, or performing maintenance. Over several millennia, invention, scientific discovery, and engineering principles have offers humans to go forward from devloping simple machines that merely redirect or amplify force, through engines for harnessing supplementary power to direct or determining sources, to today's complex, regulated systems that automate many steps within a work process.

In the 20th century, the development of electronics and new mathematical insights led to the creation and widespread adoption of fast, general-purpose computers. Just as mechanization can substitute for the physical labor of many human beings, computers allow for the partial automation of mental work before carried out by human workers, such as calculations, document transcription, and basic customer service requests. Research and development of related technologies like machine learning and robotics sustains into the 21st century.

Beyond tools and machines used to actively perform tasks, workers benefit when other passive elements of their work and environment are designed properly. This includes everything from personal items like workwear and safety gear to qualities of the workspace itself like furniture, lighting, air quality, and even the underlying architecture.