Labor rights are the codification of the insight that the person who sells their labor is not simply a factor of production but a human being with needs, dignity, and the right not to be exhausted or endangered for someone else's profit. The history of the labor movement is a history of that insight fighting against economic power that preferred not to acknowledge it — and the current rollback of labor protections in many countries reflects the same power dynamics that the movement arose to challenge. What is called deregulation in contemporary economic discourse is often the reregulation of the economy in favor of capital over labor.
Each step builds on the last.