labor-intensive

[ley-ber-in-ten-siv]

adjective

1. requiring or using a large supply of labor, relative to capital.

labor-intensive

1. A term describing industries that require a great deal of labor relative to capital (compare capital-intensive). Examples of labor-intensive industries are forms of agriculture that cannot make use of machinery and service industries, such as restaurants.

Word History and Origins

Origin of labor-intensive¹

First recorded in 1950–55

Example Sentences

AI tools, the argument goes, would make work less labor-intensive for customers.

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The difficulty was scale: thousands of phosphine ligands exist, and experimentally screening them for an unfamiliar reaction would be slow, labor-intensive, and generate unnecessary chemical waste.

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Producing statistics is labor-intensive, and the current methods don’t always yield timely, bulletproof information.

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And it’s unlikely to ever replace the labor-intensive factories in Buenos Aires and other cities that have been battered by Milei’s austerity.

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Robots are coming to a town near you—deployed by cities to do work that is labor-intensive, repetitive or dangerous for humans.

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