Commonwealth v. John T. Connor Co.

• Decision Date: 30 November 1915
• Citation: 110 N.E. 301,222 Mass. 299
• Parties: COMMONWEALTH v. JOHN T. CONNOR CO.
• Court: United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court

222 Mass. 299

110 N.E. 301

COMMONWEALTH

v.JOHN T. CONNOR CO.

Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Suffolk.

Nov. 30, 1915.

Exceptions from Superior Court, Suffolk County; John F. Brown, Judge.

The John T. Connor Company was convicted of violating St. 1913, c. 758, and brings exceptions. Exceptions overruled.

A. C. Webber, Asst. Dist. Atty., of Boston, for the Commonwealth.

J. Joseph Foley, of Cambridge, for defendant.

RUGG, C. J.

[1] The defendant is charged with having employed Elsie Finn in laboring more than ten hours in one day and more than fifty-four hours in the week, in violation of St. 1913, c. 758. The pertinent words of that statute are:

‘No woman shall be employed in laboring in any factory or workshop, or in any manufacturing, mercantile, mechanical establishment, telegraph office or telephone exchange, or by any express or transportation company, more than ten hours in any one day; and in no case shall the hours of labor exceed fifty-four in a week,’ with exceptions not here material.

There was evidence tending to show that the defendant employed Elsie Finn as cashier in its grocery store, admittedly ‘a mercantile establishment,’ a greater number of hours than stated in the statute. Her work consisted of making change during all the day to customers, who presented to her slips received from the salesmen together with the money in payment for the goods purchased as shown on the slip. She was confined in an inclosure during working hours, just about large enough for two persons to sit in, called a ‘cage.’ She was kept busy all the time. She did incidentally a trifling amount of bookkeeping in connection with the slips handed her. She also gave trading stamps to customers. The question to be decided is whether this evidence warranted a finding that she was ‘employed in laboring’ within the meaning of these words in the statute.

The constitutionality of statutes limiting the hours of labor of women has been upheld, commonly on the ground that woman is under an industrial disability by reason of sex, that her physical structure and the duty of maternity place her at a disadvantage, and that her strength and vitality are likely to be impaired by confining and exacting labor under adverse conditions, and that thus the public welfare is injured by affecting deleteriously the vigor of mothers and through them the virility of the race. Com. v. Hamilton Mfg. Co., 120 Mass. 383, decided in 1876; Com. v. Riley, 210 Mass. 387, 97 N. E. 367, Ann. Cas. 1912D, 388;Muller v. Oregon, 208 U. S. 412, 421, 28 Sup. Ct. 324,52 L. Ed. 551,13 Ann. Cas. 957. This reasoning applies quite as strongly where the labor is not purely physical but is also mental. The words ‘labor’ or ‘laboring’ have no hard and fast meaning. They are of comprehensive scope and may be equally descriptive of that done by those who toil exclusively with their brains as well as by those who perform the roughest and least intellectual kind of manual work. Mitchell v. Packard, 168 Mass. 467, 47 N. E. 113,60 Am. St. Rep. 404. The point is to ascertain the meaning of the Legislature when it used the words of this statute. They first occur in St. 1842, c. 60, § 3, which enacted that:

‘No child under the age of twelve years shall be employed in laboring in any manufacturing establishment more than ten hours in any one day.’

If attention be fixed solely on the history of these words...