From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishlabour-intensiveˌlabour-ˈintensive British English, labor-intensive American English adjective PEan industry or type of work that is labour-intensive needs a lot of workers → capital-intensive labour-intensive farming methods
Examples from the Corpus
labour-intensive• The project is what you might call labour-intensive.• Work on site, however, even in the 1980s remains fairly labour-intensive.• Like all forms of animation, this is time-consuming, labour-intensive and, therefore, expensive.• By contrast, the local authorities have mainly helped small businesses in more labour-intensive industries.• What they have to say throws doubt on previous inferences about how labour-intensive Maya agricultural techniques were, at least at San Antonio.• Reductions in spending on labour-intensive services increase unemployment and hence social security costs.• For the most part, these contract workers work under the supervision of permanent staff, performing more labour-intensive tasks.From Longman Business Dictionarylabour-intensiveˌlabour-inˈtensive British English, labor-intensive American English adjectiveCOMMERCEMANUFACTURING needing a lot of workers in order to produce somethingThe company was using old, labour-intensive production methods.Whereas goods production can be automated, the production of services is labor-intensive. → compare capital-intensive 