Should either Congress or individual states raise the minimum wage? This is a hot-button topic that continually propels fierce debate and advocacy, all while tens of millions of Americans benefit from the existence of laws guaranteeing them a minimum wage. But all of this political debate would be for naught without a crucial Supreme Court decision that has slipped from public memory in recent decades.
Decided 85 years ago this week, the court’s 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish upheld a state minimum-wage law for women, reversing the course of previous decisions. Although at the time this represented a seismic shift in the court’s jurisprudence, the idea that minimum-wage laws were constitutionally permissible quickly became settled law. As Justice Harlan Fiske Stone observed a mere four years later in 1941, it was “no longer open to question that the fixing of a minimum wage is within the legislative power.” For the next eight decades, the justices endorsed that statement.
In recent years, however, some of the court’s conservatives have indicated a desire to depart from stare decisis — adhering to precedent — to overturn decisions that they think manufactured constitutional rights and liberties or abridged freedoms clearly protected by the Constitution. There is every reason to think that Parrish is one of the decisions they are targeting.
In the decades preceding Parrish, time and again the court declared unconstitutional legislative efforts to implement health, safety and social welfare regulations protecting American workers. Repeatedly, the justices hewed to the laissez-faire position adopted in 1905 in Lochner v. New York, which struck down a state law imposing maximum working hours for bakers.
Undeterred by the precedent that Lochner set, reformers in the 1910s forged ahead with their agenda, and succeeded in getting 15 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico to set minimum-wage laws for women. Twice, however, the Supreme Court severely constrained these efforts — in 1923 in Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, which only applied to D.C., and in 1936 in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo. Both times, the court deemed the minimum-wage laws under consideration a violation of the “liberty of contract,” which it found to be explicitly protected by the Fifth and 14th amendments. The justices argued that the Constitution guaranteed workers and their employers the freedom to make contracts for hours and wages on their own terms, not terms imposed by the state.