This Day in Labor History: March 29, 1937. Supreme Court rules in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish that Washington's minimum wage for women was constitutional. Let's talk about how one woman standing up for her rights can change the country.
Elsie Parrish was a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel, which was owned by the West Coast Hotel Company, in Wenatchee, Washington.
Parrish was born in 1899 in Kansas, married when she was 15, had six children, and divorced her husband and moved to central Washington in 1930, where she got remarried. She started working at the hotel in 1933, making 22 1/2 cents an hour.
The state of Washington had passed a minimum wage of $14.50 a week for women workers. But enforcement was pretty lax and employers didn't believe it was constitutional. Some ignored it. The Cascadian did not pay Parrish that minimum wage.
Parrish was fired in 1935. The company offered $17 as severance, she felt she was owed $216.19, the amount she figured they owed her based on the minimum wage. A prominent local attorney took up her case pro bono.
Now, the nation's legal system had spent a century creating a doctrine of free contract. This basically said that workers and employers were equal and if a worker chose to labor for an employer, said worker agreed to the conditions of employment offered.
This of course was ridiculous. Impoverished workers and millionaire employers were not on an equal playing field. Free contract doctrine was used by courts and employers to give the rich all the power in the labor world.
This was most notoriously declared in Lochner v. New York, the 1905 case where the SCOTUS threw out a New York maximum hours law on the basis that workers should have the right to work as much as an employer wants them to work. What a right to have!
In 1908's Muller v. Oregon, the Court did amend this somewhat, declaring that an Oregon maximum hours law for women was constitutional because women needed protection.
But the 1923 case of Adkins v. Children's Hospital destroyed labor reformers hopes, when SCOTUS threw out a federal law mandating a minimum wage in Washington DC. Workers should have the freedom to labor for less! What a joke.
So Elsie Parrish's employer did not think it had to pay that minimum wage. It believed that Washington's minimum wage law was a violation of Adkins. That's why it refused. The first judge in the case agreed with the hotel company.
The Washington Supreme Court took the case on direct appeal and overruled the lower court, claiming the minimum wage was constitutional.
When the West Coast Hotel Company appealed to the SCOTUS, it was confident. After all, the reactionaries on the Court had overturned progressive law after progressive law. This is what led to FDR's court-packing scheme. The Court simply refused to allow the nation to advance.
But in a 5-4 decision, SCOTUS ruled in favor of Parrish. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes invalidated the entire freedom of contract doctrine in his decision. The path was cleared for a federal wages and hours law, which became the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
In other words, the Court's switch opened the door to the minimum wage, overtime pay, a limit on working hours, and the overall package of decency at work that the New Deal created. The question is why it switched.
We will never quite know for sure. The most likely reason for the switch is that the two relative moderates on the court--Chief Justice Hughes and Owen Roberts-were convinced by FDR's overwhelming 1936 reelection that the Court had to adjust to keep its legitimacy.
Perhaps fear of FDR's court-packing scheme contributed. The 4 reactionaries on the court did not care at all. McReynolds, Sutherland, Van Devanter, and Butler were horrible fundamentalist conservatives. They retired soon after the Court started validating the New Deal.
West Coast v. Parrish also became a frequently cited decision granting states police power to ensure basic health and safety for the public.
The aftermath of this case did not change Elsie Parrish’s life, although she did finally received her back pay. She told a local newspaper: “I am so glad, not only for myself, but for all the women of the state who have been working for just whatever they could get.”
Here's a picture of Elsie Parrish on the job. Again one woman standing up for herself can transform the nation. She's one of the national heroes you've never heard of. 
Back tomorrow with a thread on the single worst workplace disaster in American history, the Hawk's Nest tunnel in West Virginia and the massive slaughter of mostly black workers from silicosis.
