After agriculture, the capital employed in manufactures puts into motion the greatest quantity of productive labour, and adds the greatest value to the annual produce.
The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material product--commonly some article of consumption.
This result actually follows, in some measure, so far as regards the lower classes, whose ordinary means of acquiring goods is productive labour.
On the contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly discountenances participation in productive labour.
The musical instrument and the skill of the musician are equally the result of productive labour, but are themselves unproductively consumed.
The phrases productive labour, and productive consumption, have been employed by some writers on political economy with very great latitude.
The spinning-jenny, and the skill of the cotton spinner, are not only the result of productive labour, but are themselves productively consumed.
There is but one step farther to the prostitute, who affects no form of productive labour, and who, in place of life, is recognised as producing disease and death, but who exists parasitically through her sexual attribute.
Productive labour adds to the wealth of the world, it does not take away.
The housemaid would be more of a step in advance if the housewife, released from her former duties, then entered the ranks of productive labour, paid her substitute, and contributed something further to the world's wealth.
If half the men in the world stayed at home to wait on the other half, the loss in productive labour would be that between half and the fraction required to do the work under advanced conditions, say one-twentieth.
One is mere occupation, while the other is production; and ownership of a thing must precede, in morals if not in time, the expenditure upon it of productive labour.
The above list will hopefully provide you with a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "productive labour" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this group of words.
