A legal provision requiring an employer to pay a certain wage to his employees would be considered unheard-of and revolutionary in America. Our courts have declared such provisions unconstitutional on several occasions. According to their opinions such provisions are a limitation of personal liberty, both of the employer and the employee. The right to free contract is to them an inviolable, a sacred one, even if it works out to the great disadvantage of the employee. But the remarkable part of it is that women and children have not this right of free contract. State legislatures have the right to determine how many hours a day a woman may work. If such a law should be passed in regard to men, it would be unconstitutional.

Some of the states of the Union have passed laws providing for minimum wages, but, as has been said above, such provisions are applicable only to women and minors. It is impossible to say whether we shall ever get to the point where such provisions will be applicable also to men. But all we want to show today 2is how the laws concerning minimum wages operate, and how they work in practice.

The Secretary of Labor at Washington has recently issued a bulletin dealing with these questions. It deals with legally established minimum wages not only in American states in which such laws exist, but also abroad. Countries outside of America make no distinction between men and women in this respect. They protect the men just as much as the women. The bulletin, and other reports on the subject, show that such laws are to the advantage of both employers and employees. In Australia and New Zealand, where such laws have been in existence for the last fifteen years, the industries flourish and employees prosper; in short, the laws appear to be generally beneficial.

The bulletin is very comprehensive. It discusses minimum wage laws in the United States, in the several states of Australia and New Zealand, where they originated, and, finally, in England where experiments have been made in such laws and a special commission has been appointed for their study.

Minimum wage laws made a mass appearance in the United States in 1912 and 1913, when they were passed by nine states of the Union. But that does not mean that the movement is a recent one. The fact is that work along this line was being done for many years. Investigations were being made, and the operation of such laws in other countries was being studied. There is not a great deal of enthusiasm for experimentation with laws in the United States, particularly where there is a suspicion that they may work against the interests of industrialists and businessmen. As a rule, we wait--wait for a long time--to see how the new laws are working out elsewhere. The laws passed in the various states are a result of experiments made in New Zealand, Australia, and England, where various methods of preventing the evils resulting from low wages had been tried.

In this country we started with the introduction of minimum wages only when statistics had proved that thousands of women were being paid wages far from sufficient for bearable human living. Conditions in department stores in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and elsewhere have been investigated, and it 4has been found that fully forty per cent of men employed in such stores are receiving less than six dollars a week, and seventy-four per cent of them less than eight dollars a week. These investigations have disclosed also the most significant fact that of all stores employing women those that have been paying more decent wages have been much more successful than those that have been exploiting their employees.

The first state to pass a minimum wage law for women was Massachusetts, in 1912. The next was Oregon, followed by Utah, Washington, Nebraska, Minnesota, Colorado, California, and Wisconsin, in the order named. As stated above, these laws concern themselves only with women and minors, while in all countries other than the United States minimum wage laws include provisions for men also.

The State of Utah is the only one whose laws specify the minimum wage--that is, it prescribes in figures the least amount to be paid a woman as wages. All the other states provide for a commission which is to study industrial 5conditions, and determine what the minimum wage is to be. These commissions examine both the employers and employees in their investigations. In a number of instances, these commissions are supported by a council composed of an equal number of representatives of employers and of employees in addition to a number of disinterested, impartial representatives of the general public.

The study of the results of minimum wage laws operating in the United States proves that they are similar to the results of such laws operating overseas. In Australia, as well as here, business and industrial enterprises which have raised the pay of their employees have never suffered and have always profited by doing so. Wherever the living standard of employees was raised and sweat shop conditions were abolished, business was also improved and earnings were increased. In Utah, where the law went into force in 1913 and the wages of women were advanced, the pay rolls did not increase more than five per cent. No wages originally higher than the minimum wage required by the law have been lowered, the efficiency of woman workers has increased, and the ability to compete with other enterprises has not suffered.

When a similar law was to be passed in the State of Washington, all kinds of bad results were predicted. It was predicted that there would be mass discharges of women and replacing of them by men, that wages would be leveled down so that women now receiving better pay would suffer, that women would be replaced by poorly paid men, and that the minimum wage would become the maximum wage. None of these prophecies have been fulfilled.

Thus, a clothing manufacturer in Seattle employing many women, a man who since the very beginning was opposed to a minimum wage law, writes: "My own personal experience shows that this innovation has been beneficial to my business, because it has resulted in better conditions, a greater orderliness has been observed, and the working hours are being better maintained. Our wages have been raised one dollar a week, in some cases even more. Those employees who have always been diligent have remained so; those who had not been, now find that they have to be in order to keep their jobs. Therefore I approve of the new law. The production has increased in my plant, the workers are more interested in their work, and 7the owner gets the benefit. I am not in a position to talk on behalf of everybody. The law may have hurt those who are less capable, but on the whole it has raised the production."

When the law was introduced in England, the representatives of the government reported to Parliament that its results were so beneficial that many manufacturers have requested the government to extend the application of the law to their industries.