There are no restrictions on the hours of duty on board ship in English law.
Some attempt was made to keep the hours of work of railway workers within reasonable limits by the Railway Regulation Act of 1893, but this Act is now in practice superseded by the provisions of part IV. of the Railways Act 1921, under which Boards are set up to settle all questions relating to rates of pay, hours of duty and other conditions in the railway service.
The various measures considered above, whether dealing with factories, mines, ships, railways or work places of various kinds under the Public Health Acts, and also certain of those which will be described in the following section, in so far as they are "protective" in character, all provide for means to be taken to enforce and administer the law. The ap propriate authorities are given power by the Acts to appoint the necessary inspecting officers and those officers are endowed with power to enter and inspect places affected, examine registers, and so forth. Provision is also commonly made for instructing the workers in the terms of the law for their protection, by requiring abstracts of the law, copies of regulations, or information of vari ous other kinds to be posted up for all to see. Employers are also required to keep registers (for instance, of persons employed, of medical examinations, of accidents or cases of ill-health) in order to facilitate inspection. Some of the Acts contain interesting rules of procedure for such matters as enquiries into the causes of accidents and the issuing of regulations or orders. Provision is also made, in some cases, for proposed regulations to which ex ception is taken by interested persons, to be submitted to arbitra tion. It must be remembered that provisions of this kind form an essential part of all "protective" labour law, but it is not possi ble to discuss them in detail within the confines of this article.
The con tractual relations of master and servant, or, in modern parlance, of employer and employed, are governed by the rules of common law and equity concerning the creation and validity of contracts in general. The essential point is, therefore, that in return for
whatever the one party undertakes to do under the contract, the other must undertake to give "valuable consideration." If there is no consideration the contract must take the form of a deed. Contracts by deed may, however, be disregarded for practical pur poses in connection with contracts of service, in which the con sideration normally consists in some sort of remuneration on the one hand and services to be rendered on the other. Thus to create a valid contract of service it is only necessary for two parties, in tending to create a legal relationship, to agree upon the services to be rendered and the remuneration to be received. The terms of the agreement need not be stated expressly. They may be merely implied by conduct. Neither writing nor even words are essential at common law, though there are statutory exceptions, which are given below. As far as common law is concerned, if one person does work for another without that other rejecting his services, there may be an implied contract of service with an implied under taking to give "consideration" for the services rendered. "Con sideration" is a very wide term. It may consist "either in some right, interest, profit, or benefit accruing to the one party, or in some forbearance, detriment, loss or responsibility given, suffered or undertaken by the other" (Currie v. Misa, 1875, L.R. 10 Ex. 162). Thus at common law (apart from statutory exceptions) the consideration in a contract of service need not necessarily take the form of wages. Nor need the consideration be adequate. So long as there is something of some value in the eye of the law to represent the consideration for the other party's undertaking, the contract will be enforceable (except in the circumstances render ing a contract illegal, which will be dealt with below). As regards a lawful contract, the courts have refused to enquire into the adequacy of the consideration or whether the agreement is too much to the advantage of one of the parties (Hitchcock v. Coker, 1837, 6 A. and E. 438).