Magna Carta, and Other AddressesGuthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
History
Magna Carta, and Other Addresses
Guthrie, William D. (William Dameron)
Constitutional law -- United States
elaborate regulations of our public health and labor laws be duly
enforced. There were, however, conflicting medical authorities cited to
the court, which asserted that the trade was not unwholesome.
Lochner owned a bakery at Utica in which he worked himself and
employed three or four workmen. There was only one oven, and it was
above ground. The building was clean, especially well ventilated and
sanitary. The only question before the court in the case was whether
Lochner could be made a criminal and imprisoned for permitting his
workmen to labor more than ten hours in any day under the best
sanitary conditions, and the Supreme Court held that this could not be
done without violating his constitutional rights. Had the conditions
of work in bread, biscuit, or confectionery factories in the state of
New York been shown to have been unusually dangerous and necessarily
unwholesome, the law would undoubtedly have been sustained by the
Supreme Court, as was the Utah miners' act in Holden _vs._ Hardy.[15]
No one who has studied the decisions of the New York courts or of
the Supreme Court of the United States can doubt that any statutory
provision reasonably tending to protect the health of bakers and other
workmen and to prevent labor in unhealthful places would be upheld as
clearly within the police power of the legislature.
The act, moreover, was one-sided and discriminatory in that it made the
employer a criminal but left the workman free to do as he saw fit. A
baker working for A for ten hours in one day was left at liberty to go
next door to B, A's competitor, and, if he saw fit, work another ten
hours for B. In fact, as I am told, the informer on whose testimony
Lochner was convicted frequently worked ten hours a day for Lochner and
a number of hours additional in another bakery. If the act had been
honestly conceived in a desire to safeguard the health of bakers, it
would, of course, have provided some punishment for any violation of
the law on the part of the workmen, and not have left them at liberty
to disregard its spirit whenever they saw fit to do so.
The principle involved in this Bakers case was universal, and if
employers in bread, biscuit, or confectionery factories could be made
criminals for permitting their employees to labor more than ten hours
in any one day, the legislature could enact similar legislation as to
every other employment. No court would then have power to regulate
the degree of the exercise of legislative discretion in such cases.
The provision, which at first limited the workday to ten hours, could
thereafter be changed to eight hours, or even to six hours, as was
advocated in More's "Utopia."
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