Wages and the Courts

Hours legislation reflected the belief that some work was so unhealthy or dangerous as to require restrictions on the time that a laborer spent at it. Such statutes were justified on the grounds that certain classes of workers, such as women and children, required state protection. Minimum-wage legislation, however, stirred lingering fears of governmental redistribution of wealth and violation of freedom to contract. "[A]ny wages are 'fair'," wrote conservative critic W. A. Croffut, "which are as high as that sort of work commands in the open market." ⁴⁸

The courts indeed accepted some degree of legislative prerogative, and, as with hours legislation, an initial judicial assault on wage statutes was followed by acceptance of most of them. Many mines and factories, for example, paid in scrip. These were certificates, not legal tender, redeemable only in company-owned stores, which charged premium prices. Payment in scrip forced workers to buy through the company

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store and bound them to their employers. Labor groups successfully pushed for the legislative abolition of scrip payment and, even more, for laws that regularized the time and place at which workers were paid.

Godcharles & Co. v. Wigeman ( 1886) was the first important scrip case. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court invoked liberty to contract in overturning a statute that outlawed scrip payment. The judges described the law as "an insulting attempt to put the laborer under a legislative tutelage which is not only degrading to his manhood, but subversive of his rights as a citizen of the United States. He may sell his labor as he sees fit." ⁴⁹ Through the 1880s and the early 1890s state supreme courts regularly cited Godcharles. Judge Adam Snyder of the West Virginia Supreme Court in 1889 condemned all scrip laws as attempts "to degrade the intelligence, virtue, and manhood of the American laborer, and hoist upon the people a paternal government of the most objectionable character, because it assumes that the employer is a knave, and the laborer an imbecile." ⁵⁰

By the turn of the century, however, courts had reversed themselves, recognizing, as in other areas of protective legislation, that scrip laws were acceptable because the parties in the contractual relationship were not on equal ground. State judges in Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts approved a variety of payroll-regulating measures. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Knoxville Iron Co. v. Harbison ( 1901), contributed additional impetus to the movement by validating the legislative power to set standards for paying and computing the wages of workers.

State courts eventually embraced minimum-wage legislation for women but not men, with the most intense litigation during and after World War I. After initial reversals in New York ( 1901), Indiana ( 1903), and Nebraska ( 1914), the pendulum swung in the other direction. As judges accepted the principle that legislatures could fix the hours of women's work, which obviously affected wages, they gradually acknowledged that women's wages could be fixed directly. Judges in Oregon, Minnesota, Arkansas, Washington, and Massachusetts between 1914 and 1920 sustained minimum-wage laws for women, on the basis that the physical condition of women required special legislative protection through the police powers. No such provisions extended to men, however.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Bunting v. Oregon, accepted tacitly that states might indirectly regulate wages by placing a penalty of extra pay for overtime work, but when the issue of wage regulation was posed directly to them, they were intransigent. The majority on the high court clung to the doctrine of freedom to contract in minimum-wage cases, and in Adkins v. Children's Hospital ( 1923) the justices struck down a federal wage provision for women. Only at the end of the New Deal did the Court reverse its position and did state and federal minimum-wage laws for male and female workers pass constitutional muster. Still, "in the field of minimum-wage regulation, as in regulation of child labor and hours, state courts, after initial hostility, proved more than receptive to the arguments of reformers." ⁵¹

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 723