contract labor
Americannoun
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labor coercible by the enforceable provisions of a contract.
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foreign labor supplied under contract for a particular job.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Gig work, contract labor, informal employment, and multiple job-holding complicate headline payroll figures.
From Barron's • Dec. 24, 2025
In Hawaii, plantation owners used contract labor from Portugal, China, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to grow their crops, especially sugarcane.
From Textbooks • Dec. 14, 2022
Raytheon's head, Greg Hayes, told investors last week the company had deployed teams to work with 400 problematic suppliers "on a daily basis, getting them raw material, giving them contract labor, giving them technical support."
From Reuters • Nov. 4, 2022
In 1942, the temporary contract labor Bracero Program attracted millions of Latino workers to the country, including more than 46,000 Mexican laborers in the Northwest.
From Seattle Times • Aug. 13, 2022
He promised them that they would not be inconvenienced for more than a day or two, that the Americans would soon be shipped to Dresden as contract labor.
From "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
