§ 8. Broader aspects of this legislation. The subject took on a new aspect when the legislature of Oregon, in 1913, declared broadly that "no person shall be hired, nor permitted to work for wages, under any conditions or terms, for longer hours or days of service than is consistent with his health and physical well-being and ability to promote the general welfare by his increasing usefulness as a healthy and intelligent citizen, " and fixed ten hours as the limit of work consistent with such a measure of health and welfare, in work in any mill, factory, or manufacturing establishment. This law was sustained by the Supreme Court of that state, and on appeal the decision was affirmed by the United States Supreme court.* In support of the law there was presented a voluminous brief giving a most impressive body of evidence from scientific and from practical business sources, to show the many evils, popularly unsuspected or underestimated, that result from long hours even in industries of no exceptional hazards.5 Psysio-logical and psychological tests demonstrate that the fatigue following more than a moderate working period not only reduces immediate efficiency, but so poisons the system that greater liability to accident, disease, intemperance, immorality, and premature decay results.

4 Bunting vs. State of Oregon, 243 U. S. 426 (Oct., 1916).

Two main purposes appear somewhat intermingled in this legislation in limitation of hours. The first purpose is to protect the public directly where the safety of others is dependent on the health and efficiency of the worker. The second purpose is to protect directly the worker's health and welfare, that policy being recognized to be in the long run the best likewise for the public welfare. In legal reasoning it is being recognized that the individual wage worker, even the adult male, is not in a position to judge the number of hours he ought, for his own good, to work, and is unable to fix the length of his own working-day. As a matter of economic theory, the usance of a child, a woman, or a man is merely that kind and amount of service that can be given out by each without repressing the normal possibilities of growth, reducing the normal health and vigor, or shortening the normal period of healthy productive human existence.6 It is becoming a general social policy to prevent the abnormal strains of industry that cause the unnatural deterioration of the human factor in industry. A wage worker may be permitted to sell his daily net fund of working power - his usance - but not his life.

Among the principles in the labor section of the Versailles treaty are the following: "the adoption of an eight hours' day or a forty-eight hours' week as the standard to be aimed at where it has not already been attained," and "the adoption of a weekly rest of at least twenty-four hours, which should include Sunday whenever practicable."

5 Published as "The Case for the Shorter Working Day," by the National Consumers' League; see especially pp. 621-892. 6 See Vol. I, pp. 135 and 197.

§ 9. Plan of the minimum wage. Even more recent than the legislative regulation of hours downward is the attempt to regulate wages upward in the case of certain low-paid wage workers. It is true that much public regulation of wages occurred in Europe before the end of the eighteenth century; but in the main this was directed toward limiting the demands of the wageworkers, and in England its administration was in the hands of justices of the peace who were of the employing class. The modern movement for the minimum wage began in Victoria in 1896, and it soon extended to nearly all the other Australasian states. Great Britain applied the plan in 1910 to industries in which wages were exceptionally low. The plan was first adopted in the United States by Massachusetts in the year 1912, though in an emasculated form, and spread so rapidly that at the end of 1919 it was found in fourteen states and in the District of Columbia. Minimum-wage laws usually lay down a "living wage" as the standard to be used, and they are known as "flat-rate" or "wage-board" laws, according as they prescribe a flat rate of wages or, as is more frequent, leave the decision in each case to a wage commission established to administer the law.

At first glance the principles involved in the legislation limiting hours and those in minimum-wage legislation may seem to be the same. But there is an important difference. In the former case the evil is that of a too long working period, injurious to health, and this can be reached directly and stopped by an efficiently administered law. But in the latter case the real evil is industrial weakness and incapacity such that the workers are unable to command a "living wage" in a competitive market. A minimum-wage law, by itself, neither cures the industrial incapacity nor insures employment to the industrially weak at any wage. The law does not attempt to compel employers to employ at the legal minimum wage every one who wishes to work; it merely declares that the employer shall not employ any one whom, in his employ, he finds to be not worth so high a wage.

§ 10. Wage theory in the minimum wage. In most discussions of the wages of women there is a ready confusion of sympathetic ideals of what one would like to see with the cold facts as they are. Women's services (especially those of young women) have increasingly of late been coming upon the labor market in such a way as to cause abnormal congestion in a few occupations. Employers have not caused low wages in these cases. Partly these occupations are the clean, light, and agreeable ones; partly they have a relative social glamour; largely they can be followed for a few years near the home of the worker; nearly always they may be undertaken with brief training and little skill. Investigation has shown that at least 80 per cent of this group of girl workers live at home. A wage that is a "living wage" when used as a pro-rata contribution to an American family income is frequently insufficient for the girl living "independently." Such a girl is, under the conditions, unable to earn a living in her chosen occupation, and the minimum-wage law takes her need as the standard up to which must be raised the wages of the other four fifths.

It may be better to deal with such individual cases as appear among the one fifth of all girls employed than to apply governmental wage-fixing to the whole group. Unless the demand for a particular kind of service is absolutely inelastic (a rare if not impossible situation in a large market), there must be fewer jobs for the less capable workers at high than at low wages, other prices remaining the same. Further, some of the less capable workers must be crowded out of such jobs as remain; for an artificially higher wage attracts into an occupation some from other occupations in which the pay before was higher. It seems to be admitted by the friends of minimum-wage legislation that this result is logically to be expected, and that to some degree it appears. Of course, it is never possible to tell to just what extent workers have been and are being excluded in this way from any particular establishment or occupation. Forbidden to earn what they can, the poorer workers must become dependent on charity. It may be said, and perhaps truly: better this than underpaid labor destructive to the health of the workers, and evil in its competitive effects upon other wage workers.