Women Wage / The Fight That Brought the Minimum Wage

For a fourteen-year period in American history, minimum-wage laws were officially verboten in every last state of the union, having been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on April 9, 1923. The case, Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, concerned a Washington D.C. law that established a minimum wage for women and children employed within the city. Two appellants challenged it: a hospital that employed a number of adult women, some at wages below the minimum; and a 23-year-old woman employed by the Congress Hall Hotel as an elevator operator. Earning $35 per month plus two meals each day, the elevator operator avowed that her “work was light and healthful, the hours short, with surroundings clean and moral,” and that her employer would be glad to retain her, as she ardently wished, but only at her present wage.

Justice George Sutherland wrote the majority opinion, concurring with the appellant’s argument that a minimum wage for women and children “authorizes an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract,” in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. Social-justice advocates regarded the decision as a major blow and an indefensible act of judicial activism. In ensuing years, it would frustrate at least a dozen state legislatures and multiple presidents, and help fuel a historic attempt to undermine the U.S. Supreme Court. It would also be hailed by its defenders as a sensible defense of individual liberty in employment.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from

via The Epic, Surprisingly Sexist Fight That Brought the Minimum Wage to America – Conor Friedersdorf – The Atlantic.