Abstract
In 1996 Californians voted on the issue of raising the minimum wage, bypassing an obscure government agency, the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC). In the November election, critics of the commission's consistent failure to raise the state minimum wage won an initiative campaign by a large majority.2 Ironically, both the initiative and the ostensibly independent commission of experts that it circumvented were progressive reforms of the early twentieth century. The IWC has been controversial from its founding in 1913, when it was surrounded by conflict over the constitutionality of a minimum wage law for women and opposed by the state's labor establishment at the urging of its female members. Their concernsbureaucratic inefficiency, lack of public accountability, and partisanship in governmental appointments-remain live issues,
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