West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish

Summary

Washington State's 1913 Minimum Wages for Women act declared that inadequate wages and unsanitary conditions harmed the health and morals of women and minors, and it created an Industrial Welfare Commission to fix wages sufficient for their decent maintenance. Elsie Parrish worked as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, owned by the West Coast Hotel Company. The minimum set for her work was $14.50 for a forty-eight-hour week, and she was paid less. With her husband she sued for the difference. The trial court ruled for the hotel on the strength of Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), which had struck down a District of Columbia minimum wage for women; the Supreme Court of Washington reversed and upheld the statute. The hotel argued that Adkins controlled: a wage fixed by the state without regard to the value of the work was an arbitrary taking of the employer's property and liberty of contract under the Fourteenth Amendment, as the Court had reaffirmed in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo only the year before. Parrish's side and the state answered that the legislature could reasonably conclude that women workers bargained from weakness, that starvation wages damaged health and threw the cost of relief on the public, and that the Constitution left such judgments to lawmakers. On 29 March 1937 the Court affirmed, five to four, and overruled Adkins. Chief Justice Hughes observed that the Constitution mentions liberty, not freedom of contract, and that liberty is always subject to reasonable regulation for the protection of the community. He traced earlier decisions upholding hours laws and price regulation, adopted the reasoning of the Adkins dissents by Chief Justice Taft and Justice Holmes, and stressed the burden that underpaid workers placed on public relief during the Depression. A legislature, he added, need not cure every evil at once, so limiting the law to women did not deny equal protection. Justice Sutherland, for himself and Justices Van Devanter, McReynolds and Butler, replied that the Constitution's meaning does not shift with economic conditions, that judges must enforce it even against desirable legislation, and that Adkins had been rightly decided. A wage fixed without reference to the worth of the service, he argued, compelled the employer to support the employee, and the ability to bargain does not depend on sex. The library text gives the Chief Justice's opinion and Sutherland's dissent in full, with the notes left out. Because Roosevelt had announced his plan to enlarge the Court in February 1937, Roberts's vote was soon nicknamed the switch in time that saved nine, though historians have shown that the conference vote was taken in December 1936. Congress enacted a federal minimum wage in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which the Court upheld in United States v. Darby (1941).

Top Lessons

• Liberty versus freedom of contract

  Hughes reads the due process clause as protecting liberty in general rather than any particular doctrine of contract, so that the question becomes whether a regulation is reasonable. Sutherland answers that liberty to agree on wages had been settled as part of that liberty by earlier decisions and should not be qualified by economic need.

• Overruling a precedent

  The Court had decided Adkins in 1923 and reaffirmed its rule in 1936. Hughes explains why the question was open again and why the earlier dissents now persuade a majority; Sutherland insists that a sound decision should not give way merely because times are hard. The case is a lesson in how courts weigh stability against correction.

• Wages, the employer and the community

  Hughes argues that paying less than a living wage shifts the cost of a worker's support onto taxpayers, so the public has a stake in wage bargains. Sutherland argues that a wage fixed without regard to the value of the work forces the employer to carry a social burden that belongs to the community as a whole.

• Protecting women or treating them equally

  The statute applied only to women and minors. Hughes relied on Muller v. Oregon and women's weaker bargaining position; Sutherland held that a woman's ability to make a fair bargain is no less than a man's. Both justices claimed to respect women's dignity while reaching opposite conclusions.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The Washington statute justified the minimum wage as a protection for the health and morals of women and minors, and Hughes accepts the legislature's judgment that wages too low for decent maintenance endanger health, so the case shows wage law being defended in the language of public health.