Maximum Hours and Minimum Wages Legislation

• Author: William P. Murphy
• Pages: 1699-1700

Page 1699

Regulation of the employment relationship was an important aspect of the movement toward state intervention in economic affairs, which began in the late 1800s. The transition from small individual to large corporate employers and the development of a factory system with a numerous wage-earning class resulted in pervasive exploitation of employees. The principal method of alleviating the economic injustice was statutory regulation of employment conditions. The spectrum of protective legislation was wide, including factory safety, child labor, workers' compensation, and the hours and wages of employment. In these early days the laws were state laws.

The protracted constitutional contest over hours and wage legislation was one aspect of the larger theme of SUBSTANTIVE DUE PROCESS, a concept developed by the Supreme Court at the turn of the century. Liberty included FREEDOM OF CONTRACT, which included the employment contract, of which hours and wages were the main components. The Court held that laws regulating hours and wages violated the guarantee of DUE PROCESS OF LAW if the purpose of the law was invalid or if the means were not reasonably related to a valid purpose.

Hours legislation began in the 1870s. Reformers perceived the duration of the workday as related to the employees' health and safety, protection of which was a valid legislative purpose. In its first opinion on the subject, HOLDEN V. HARDY (1898), the Court sustained a law limiting the hours of men working in mines to eight a day. The hazardous nature of the work justified the limitation as a valid health and safety measure. In MULLER V. OREGON (1908) an hours limitation for women was sustained on the theory that the "weaker sex" required special protection.

Beyond these two exceptional situations the Court at first prohibited hours regulation. The prototype case was LOCHNER V. NEW YORK (1905). A 5?4 Court invalidated a law restricting the work of bakery employees to ten hours a day and sixty hours a week. Despite massive documentation, the Court refused to recognize that the baking industry posed any special health danger to which hours of work were reasonably related. More broadly, the Court concluded that the law was not truly a health law, but a "purely labor law" to regulate hours, an impermissible objective.

This strict view yielded to persistent pressures. In BUNTING V. OREGON (1917) hours regulation of adult males in factories was sustained...