The Minimum Wage in Operation
Happily the advocate of this measure is no longer required to meet the objection that it is novel and utterly uncertain. For more than twenty years it has been in operation in Australasia. It was implicit in the compulsory arbitration act of New Zealand, passed in 1894; for the wages which the arbitration boards enforce are necessarily the lowest that the affected employers are permitted to pay; besides, the district conciliation boards are empowered by the law to fix minimum wages on complaint of any group of underpaid workers. The first formal and explicit minimum wage law of modern times was enacted by the state of Victoria in 1896. In the beginning it applied to only six trades, but it has been extended at various legislative sessions, so that to-day it protects substantially all the labourers of the state, except those employed in agriculture. Since the year 1900 all the other states of Australia have made provision for the establishment of minimum wages. At present, therefore, the legal minimum wage in some form prevails throughout the whole of Australasia.
In 1909 the Trade Boards Act authorised the application of this device to four trades in Great Britain. In 1913 the provisions of the Act were made applicable to four other trades, and in 1914 to a third group of four industries. A special minimum wage law was in 1912 enacted to govern the entire coal mining industry of the country.
The first minimum wage law in the United States was passed in 1912 by Massachusetts. It has been followed by similar legislation in ten other states; namely, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin. California has adopted a constitutional amendment which specifically authorises minimum wage legislation for women and minors, and Ohio added a similar provision to her constitution which applies to men as well.
The minimum wage statutes of Australasia and Great Britain cover all classes of workers, but those of the United States are restricted to minors and women. With the exception of the Utah act, all the important laws on this subject in all three regions establish minimum wages indirectly, by authorising commissions and wage boards to determine the actual rates. In Australasia and Great Britain the statutes do not attempt to specify any standard to which the wage determinations of the boards must conform, but the tendency in the former country in recent years has been to enforce a living wage as the minimum; that is, wage rates sufficiently high to provide a decent family livelihood for men, and a reasonable personal livelihood for women and minors. All the laws in America but one require the commissions to establish living wages. In Utah no commission is provided for, as the law itself specifies in terms of money the minimum rates of remuneration that the employers of women are permitted to pay.
The effectiveness of the laws that have been put into operation is at least as great as their friends had dared to hope. According to Professor M. B. Hammond of Ohio, who investigated the situation on the spot in the winter of 1911-1912, the people of Australasia have accepted the minimum wage "as a permanent policy in the industrial legislation of that part of the world." Professor Hammond's observations, and the replies of the Chief Factory Inspector of Melbourne to the New York Factory Investigating Commission, show the main effects of minimum wage legislation to be as follows: sweating and strikes have all but disappeared; the efficiency of the workers has on the whole increased; the number of workers unable to earn the legal minimum has not been as great as most persons had feared, and almost all of them have obtained employment at lower remuneration through special permits; the legal minimum has not only not become the actual maximum, but is exceeded in the case of the majority of workers; no evidence exists to show that any industry has been crippled, or forced to move out of the country; with the exception of a very few instances, the prices of commodities have not been raised by the law.[251]
In the four trades of Great Britain which were first brought under the operation of the Trade Boards Act, and which presented some of the worst examples of economic oppression, the beneficial effects of the minimum wage have been even more striking than in Australasia. Wages have been considerably raised, in some cases as high as one hundred per cent.; dispirited and helpless workers have gained courage, power, and self-respect to such an extent as to increase considerably their membership in trade unions, and to obtain in several instances further increases in remuneration beyond the legal minimum; the compensation of the better paid labourers has not been reduced to the level fixed by the trade boards; the efficiency of both employés and productive processes has been on the whole increased; the number of persons forced out of employment by the law is negligible; no important rise of prices is traceable to the law; and the number of business concerns unable to pay the increase in wages is too small to deserve serious consideration. All these results had been established before the outbreak of the war.[252]
The legal minimum wage has been carried into effect in only four states of our own country. It covers practically all the industries employing women and minors in Oregon and Washington, all the working women and girls of Utah, and the women and minors of a few trades in Massachusetts. The rates established for experienced women vary from $7.50 per week in Utah to ten dollars a week for some classes in Washington. As the first wage determinations were put into effect only in 1913, American experience has been too short as well as too narrow to warrant certain conclusions. So far as it has been applied, however, the legal minimum wage has been as successful in the United States as in Australasia or Great Britain. All competent witnesses agree that it has brought a considerable increase in wages to a considerable proportion of the women and minors in the industries in which it is operative, and that it has neither thrown any important number of workers out of employment nor forced any important concern out of business. Speaking of the three leading industries in which minimum wages were first established in Washington, the Industrial Welfare Commission of that state testifies: "Seldom has any piece of legislation, in prospect, engendered so much discussion and so much criticism, as did the minimum wage law, with the intricacies of its ramifications touching almost every industry in the state, large or small, and the family of nearly every wage earner; seldom, too, has any law, in actuality, been so well received, its application been accomplished with so little open opposition, and, for a law of this character, has been attended with so little industrial disturbance as that same minimum wage law. None of the dire predictions made prior to the passage of the law have come about to an extent that questions the general efficiency of the law. There has been no wholesale discharge of women employés, no wholesale levelling of wages, no wholesale replacing of higher paid workers by cheaper help, no tendency to make the minimum the maximum, while the employers of the state in general have been following the letter and spirit of the law, and aiding greatly in its application.... The law, in other words, has advanced the wages of practically sixty per cent. of the workers in these industries, and has done it without serious opposition at a time when business conditions were none too good."[253] The Bureau of Labour Statistics of the United States investigated the operation of the minimum wage in the mercantile establishments of Oregon at the end of the first year. The conclusions of the investigators were in brief that both the number and the proportion of women getting the legal minimum ($9.25 per week) for adults had increased, that the proportion obtaining more than this rate had likewise increased, that those who had received a rise in remuneration did not show any decline in efficiency, that women had not been displaced by men, and that the average increase in the labour cost resulting from the advance in wages was only three mills on each dollar of sales.[254] The effects of the Utah law during the first year of its operation were summarised by the Labour Commissioner, Mr. H. T. Haines, as follows: a rise in the wages of a "number of women and girls who most needed the additional sums of money"; increased efficiency of female workers admitted by most employers; but few cases of women or girls utterly deprived of employment by the law; none of the higher paid women suffered a reduction in wages; and ninety per cent. of the employers are satisfied with the minimum wage statute.[255] So far as the law has been applied in Massachusetts, it seems to be relatively as successful as in the other three states.[256]
The Question of Constitutionality
The principal reason why the minimum wage laws on the statute books of the other seven states have not been carried into effect, is the uncertainty of the validity of minimum wage legislation in our constitutional system. In November, 1914, a district judge granted a writ of injunction, restraining the Minimum Wage Commission of Minnesota from enforcing their wage determinations, on the ground that the law attempted to delegate legislative power, and that its provisions violated that section of the fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution which forbids any state to deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law. One of the courts of Arkansas has taken substantially the same position. The second objection urged by the Minnesota judge is probably much the more serious of the two, and is the one upon which chief emphasis has been laid in the briefs filed in various courts by the opponents of minimum wage legislation. As regards labour legislation, "due process of law" may be practically translated, "reasonable and necessary exercise of the State's police power." And the police power means that indefinite power of the State to legislate for the health, safety, morals, and welfare of the community.[257] Now it is obvious that a minimum wage law deprives both employer and employé of some liberty of contract, and also that it virtually deprives the former of some property, inasmuch as it generally increases his outlay for wages. On the other hand, this restriction of liberty and equivalent diminution of property seem to be carried out in harmony with due process of law, since they constitute an exercise of the police power of the State on behalf of the general welfare. Some months before the Minnesota judge granted the writ of injunction against the enforcement of the minimum wage law of that state, a lower court and the Supreme Court of Oregon had pronounced the Oregon statute constitutional, as a legitimate exercise of the police power. An appeal from this judgment was argued in the Supreme Court of the United States, Dec. 17, 1914, but no decision has yet (October, 1916) been rendered. Until the highest court has spoken on the question of constitutionality, no state is likely to take any further step toward establishing minimum wages. Should the decision of the Supreme Court be unfavourable valid minimum wage legislation will be impossible without an amendment of the United States Constitution.[258]