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Manual labour (in Commonwealth English, manual labor in American English) or manual work is physical work done by humans, in contrast to labour by and . It is most literally work done with the hands (the word manual coming from the ) and, by figurative extension, it is work done with any of the muscles and bones of the human body. For most of human prehistory and history, manual labour and its close cousin, Working animal, have been the primary ways that physical work has been accomplished.
Economic competition often results in businesses trying to buy labour at the lowest possible cost (for example, through offshoring or by employing ) or to obviate it entirely (through mechanisation and automation).
Throughout human prehistory and history, wherever [[social class systems|social class]] have developed, the social status of manual [[labourers]] has, more often than not, been low, as most physical tasks were done by [[peasant]]s, [[serf|serfdom]]s, [[slaves|slavery]], indentured servants, [[wage slaves|wage slavery]], or [[domestic servant|domestic worker]]s. For example, legal scholar L. Ali Khan analyses how the [[Greek|Greek people]]s, [[Hindus]], [[English|English people]], and [[Americans|United States]] all created sophisticated social structures to outsource manual labour to distinct classes, [[caste]]s, [[ethnicities|ethnic group]], or races..
Although nearly any work can potentially have skill and intelligence applied to it, many employment that mostly comprise manual labour—such as fruit and vegetable picking, manual materials handling (for example, shelf stocking), manual digging, or manual assembly of parts—often may be done successfully (if not masterfully) by unskilled or semiskilled workers. For these reasons, there is a partial but significant correlation between manual labour and unskilled or semiskilled workers. Based on economic and social conflict of interest, people may often distort that partial correlation into an exaggeration that equates manual labour with lack of skill; with lack of any potential to apply skill (to an important task) or to develop skill (in a worker); and with low social class. Throughout human existence the latter has involved a spectrum of variants, from slavery (with stigmatisation of the slaves as 'subhuman'), to caste or caste-like systems, to subtler forms of inequality.
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