The article is devoted to the study of the social phenomenon of legal responsibility for violation of labor protection legislation behind the historiographical discourse. The purpose of the article is to highlight through the prism of human rights theory the phenomenon of legal liability for violation of labor protection legislation, which develops and evolves in temporal, social and geographical dimensions, has a direct connection with the stages of development of the state, state power and law. The author has established that the evolution of the legal regulation of state coercion (as a measure of legal responsibility) of an enterprise or employee to perform lawful actions in the field of labor protection and not to violate legislation is intertwined with the formation and development, first of all, of the right to safe and healthy working conditions. In order to study the genesis of the formation and development of legal liability for violation of labor protection legislation, the author has improved the periodization with the allocation of three stages of such development, starting from the late Middle Ages and up to the present. The analysis of the historiographical discourse of legal responsibility for violation of labor protection legislation was carried out by the author in the light of the theory of human rights. The author found that the dichotomous sign of the right to labor protection influenced the fact that at different stages of the development of the state, the balance of the application of legal responsibility in the field of labor protection of a public and private nature was not uniform. The periodization of the formation and development of legal liability for violation of labor protection legislation proposed by the author is not perfect, but it can be used in further research on this topic in the light of human rights theory.