IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/stechp/978-3-031-06477-7_3.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Health and Safety vs. Freedom of Contract: The Tortured Path of Wage and Hours Limits Through the State Legislatures and the Courts

In: Standard of Living

Author

Listed:
  • Price Fishback

    (University of Arizona)

Abstract

The paper examines changes in wage and hour labor regulation between 1898 and 1938. Many see the 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision striking down hours limits for men as the beginning of 30 years in which labor regulation was stymied by the doctrine of “freedom of contract.” That issue played a role but judges often weighed it against safety issues. As a result, hours limits for men in dangerous industries were found to be constitutional. The debates over minimum wages for women also centered on these issues. These laws passed muster in state supreme courts and initially at the US Supreme Court. In 1923, a majority of Supreme Court judges emphasized freedom of contract in declaring a female minimum wage unconstitutional. Seeing close votes and substantial turnover of judges on the Supreme Court, many states continued promulgating advisory minimums and passed new laws. Ultimately, turnover on the Court and a renewed emphasis on the role of minimum wages in ensuring health and safety of women and children during the Depression led the Court to declare minimums for women constitutional. This opened the door for federal minimum wage legislation for all workers.

Suggested Citation

  • Price Fishback, 2022. "Health and Safety vs. Freedom of Contract: The Tortured Path of Wage and Hours Limits Through the State Legislatures and the Courts," Studies in Economic History, in: Patrick Gray & Joshua Hall & Ruth Wallis Herndon & Javier Silvestre (ed.), Standard of Living, chapter 0, pages 43-67, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:stechp:978-3-031-06477-7_3
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-06477-7_3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Lochner; Freedom of contract; Labor regulations; Minimum wage; Hour limits;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J81 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Labor Standards - - - Working Conditions
    • K31 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Labor Law
    • N32 - Economic History - - Labor and Consumers, Demography, Education, Health, Welfare, Income, Wealth, Religion, and Philanthropy - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-
    • N42 - Economic History - - Government, War, Law, International Relations, and Regulation - - - U.S.; Canada: 1913-

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:stechp:978-3-031-06477-7_3. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.