The Minimum Wage as a Legislative Proposal in the United States

Abstract

The economists have at least made out a presumptive case for the desirability of a minimum standard below which wages should not be allowed to fall in the low-paid industries. The suggestion is not that wages should be fixed by law or that the principle of competition in the fixing of wages should be entirely abandoned. It is rather that further limits should be placed on competition with respect to the labor contract beyond those that now obtain in the laws of most states concerning the hours of labor, the age limits at which children may work in various occupations, etc. The proposal is also further limited by most of its advocates to women and minors, partly of course for obvious constitutional reasons in this country, and partly because the low-wage industries are where we find women and minors in the great majority and also because it is in these industries for many reasons that women and minors are peculiarly weak in bargaining power and likely to bid against each other in a life and death struggle which will carry wages far below a living income for the worker and enable the industry to exist only as a social parasite. The attempt to fix a maximum limit to agricultural wages for male workers was tried in England at several periods without great success, but those experiments in legislation were so different in their essential principles and the circumstances under which they were tried that they throw no light on the present minimum wage proposal. The attempts to standardize some of the items of the labor contract and to set certain definite conditions upon which the community will welcome or tolerate the existence of industries within its borders, otherwise free to make their own terms as between buyers and sellers of the commodities they use or produce and the labor they employ, began a little over a century ago in England when the first factory