In ancient times, in Russia, workers were considered an estate of the poor, poor people. They did not own land or any other property. They did not have actual freedom either. Moreover, for workers the concept of “freedom” was incomprehensible. Therefore, often the patronage of a master or an influential master and material security, they valued more. The owners actively used the work of the poor to satisfy their own needs. And, of course, no rights of the employee were respected. The poor were in constant fear of hunger and death.
With the adoption of factory legislation, employee rights have not been better respected. Coercive measures were applied to the working masses, which strengthened the traditions of serfdom in the field of wage labor. The legal status of the worker was formed as a branch of police law. The main condition for organizing employment was terror and the repressive regime. The host system provided economic, social, legal support to the absolute tsarist government. Coercive measures against a working person, terror and repression were authorized by law.
In the first years, Soviet power enshrined the rights of the worker in its decrees also in the form of forced labor (mobilization, labor service, monopoly of hiring workers, labor armies). As a result, the labor power of the people is nationalized, becomes the property of the state. The worker turns in some way into a soldier, and production turns into a barracks. The whole society as a whole is entering a state of "war communism", which is being replaced by an administrative-command regime building socialism. As a result, a direct form of state coercion to work is introduced, which is frightening for criminal liability for parasitism. Thus, the formation of a model of "socialist labor" takes place. In it, the employee is endowed with the function of "cog". All the “cogs” must be monitored, which necessitates the creation of control bodies in the state apparatus system.
The individual labor rights of an employee of the socialist system were fully incorporated into the new Labor Code of the Russian Federation. With minor editorial changes and additions, they formed the basis of article 21. Using a legal form, according to some authors, the labor force was fixed as a commodity, a certain economic category in the labor market. However, the worker is not only economic capital. First of all, the worker is a person, a person. This alone does not allow him to be classified as a product. The employee must have resources that contribute to the development of human capital. This idea was used in the theory of the world economy in the sixties of the last century by Schultz, Bowen, Fisher, Becker and others, was applied in practice and was reflected in international regulations expressing ways to protect the labor rights of workers. Such acts mainly include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Social Charter, ILO acts , the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights and other documents.
Self-protection by workers of labor rights, according to experts, should be legally strengthened. A working person must be guaranteed the effective preservation of social and economic interests. At the same time, according to a number of authors, special attention should be paid to the right to protection against illegal dismissal, as well as to improving the mechanism for protecting one's dignity in the process of work against various types of harassment.