A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are engaged in forced labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators.
In the Soviet Union, a synonym, Labor colony was also in use; more exactly, "Corrective labor colony", (исправительно-трудовая колония, ИТК).
Notable labor camps
Imperial Russia operated a system of remote Siberian forced labor camps as part of its regular judicial system, called katorga. Though conditions were difficult, they were mild compared to those of later Soviet camps.
The Soviet government took over the already extensive katorga system and expanded it immensely, eventually organizing the Gulag to run the camps. These camps were notorious for their extremely rough conditions; new prisoner death rate was as high as 80% at some camps. During and after the Great Purges, the Gulag camps housed millions of prisoners. Stalin used them both as a source of cheap labor, and as indirect extermination camps.
Nazis operated many extremely brutal concentration camps, which provided free forced labor for industrial and other jobs during World War II. There were several categories of Arbeitslager in Nazi system, for different categories of inmates.
The Khmer Rouge operated labor camps in Cambodia following their seizure of power, for the "rehabilitation" of the (loosely defined) bourgeois classes.
Recruitment of a labor force, then, was essential to satisfy the needs of farmers and to a lesser degree of the maritime trades, the furnace and workshop industries, and the highly skilled crafts.
Labor was in demand to build homes, cultivate the earth, exploit the natural resources of the North Atlantic coast and the interior of the continent, sail the ships, and fish the seas.
Labor and capital would part company along political lines by the middle of the 1790s, and a series of notable strikes in the following decade would signalize the start of a trade union movement fashioned to meet the changing conditions of labor in an emerging industrial society.
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