The limitation of hours has very recently been extended to many private businesses in which exceptional conditions exist affecting the health of the workers or the safety of the pub lic. This development has occurred almost entirely since the United States Supreme Court in 1898 (Holden vs. Hardy) sustained a Utah statute limiting to eight the hours of labor in underground mines. Now eight-hour laws in certain speci fied cases are found applying to mines, smelters, tunnels, and a variety of other kinds of work, and in a few cases the limit is nine, ten, or eleven hours.
hours even in industries of no exceptional hazards .° Psysio logical and psychological tests demonstrate that the fatigue following more than a moderate working period not only re duces immediate efficiency, but so poisons the system that greater liability to accident, disease, intemperance, immo rality, and premature decay results.
Two main purposes appear somewhat intermingled in this legislation in limitation of hours. The first purpose is to pro tect the public directly where the safety of others is dependent on the health and efficiency of the worker. The second pur pose is to protect directly the worker's health and welfare, that policy being recognized to be in the long run the best like wise for the public welfare. In legal reasoning it is being rec ognized 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 nor mal health and vigor, or shortening the normal period of healthy productive human existence.° It is becoming a gen eral 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. 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 de mands of the wageworkers, and in England its administration was in the hands of justices of the peace who were of the em ploying 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 fiat rate of wages or, as is more frequent, leave the decision in each case to a wage commission established to administer the law.