ABSTRACT
The particular form of labour relations between buyer and seller is, of course, highly variable. On the one hand, there is the familiar example of the contract between factory-hand and factory-owner in which the hand performs a defined labour service. On the other, there is the less familiar example of the sharecropper who labours for himself but whose contract involves the passing on of a proportion of his crop to the landowner as land rent. Producer co-operatives provide yet a further variant: here it is the contractual obligation among producers which represents the key to labour relations rather than the more singular buyer-seller format. Leaving primitive peoples aside, some human activity is
· nevertheless performed which involves no contractual obligation in the way described above: This applies to the self-employed; it also relates to labour which is carried out as part of a family-livelihood setting.
