Parrish v. West Coast Hotel Co.

• Citation: 55 P.2d 1083,185 Wash. 581
• Decision Date: 02 April 1936
• Docket Number: 26038.
• Parties: PARRISH et al. v. WEST COAST HOTEL CO.
• Court: United States State Supreme Court of Washington

55 P.2d 1083

185 Wash. 581

PARRISH et al. v. WEST COAST HOTEL CO.

No. 26038.

Supreme Court of Washington

April 2, 1936

Dpartment 2.

Appeal from Superior Court, Chelan County; W. O. Parr, Judge.

Action by Ernest Parrish and another against the West Coast Hotel Company. From a judgment for plaintiffs in an unsatisfactory amount, they appeal.

Reversed and remanded, with instructions.

C. B Conner, of Wenatchee, for appellants.

Crollard & O'Connor, of Wenatchee, for respondent.

MILLARD Chief Justice.

Mindful of the duty of the state to protect women and minors from conditions of labor which have a pernicious effect on their health and morals, the Legislature enacted chapter 174, Laws 1913 (page 602). The provisions of the act pertinent to this appeal are as follows:

'Section 1. The welfare of the State of Washington demands that women and minors be protected from conditions of labor which have a pernicious effect on their health and morals. The State of Washington, therefore exercising herein its police and sovereign power declares that inadequate wages and unsanitary conditions of labor exert such pernicious effect.

'Sec. 2. It shall be unlawful to employ women or minors in any industry or occupation within the State of Washington under conditions of labor detrimental to their health or morals; and it shall be unlawful to employ women workers in any industry within the State of Washington at wages which are not adequate for their maintenance.

'Sec. 3. There is hereby created a commission to be known as the 'Industrial Welfare Commission' for the State of Washington, to establish such standards of wages and conditions of labor for women and minors employed within the State of Washington, as shall be held hereunder to be reasonable and not detrimental to health and morals, and which shall be sufficient for the decent maintenance of women.'

From August, 1933, to May, 1935, when she was discharged, plaintiff was in the employ of defendant hotel corporation as a chambermaid at an agreed wage which was less than the minimum weekly wage of $14.50 as fixed by the Industrial Welfare Commission under section 3, chapter 174, Laws 1913 (page 602). If payable at the agreed wage, defendant owes plaintiff a balance of $17. If entitled to payment at the minimum rate established by the Industrial Welfare Commission, a balance of $216.19 is due to the plaintiff. To recover that balance, plaintiff brought this action. The cause was tried to the court, which found that plaintiff was entitled to a recovery of $17 against defendant. The court further found that chapter 174, p. 602, Laws 1913, in so far as it applies to adult women, is an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract included within the guaranties of the due process clause of the Constitution of the United States.

'No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' Section 1, Amendment 14, Federal Constitution.

Judgment was entered accordingly. Plaintiff appealed.

In Larsen v. Rice, 100 Wash. 642, 171 P. 1037, 1039, we held that the minimum wage law (chapter 174, p. 602, Laws 1913) for women was constitutional. We said: 'It is undoubtedly a general rule that private controversies between individuals sui juris may be compromised by them by mutual agreement, and that the courts will not, where no question of fraud intervenes, relieve from the agreement, even though it be shown that the one gained rights thereby to which he would not otherwise have been entitled, and that the other gave up rights to which he was fully entitled; this on the principle that compromises are favored by the law, since they tend to prevent strife and conduce to peace and to the general welfare of the community. But the controversy here had an added element not found in the ordinary controversy between individuals. It was not wholly of private concern. It was affected with a public interest. The state, having declared that a minimum wage of a certain amount is necessary to a decent maintenance of an employee engaged in the employment in which the respondent was engaged, has an interest in seeing that the fixed compensation is actually paid. The statute making the declaration not only makes contracts of employment for less than the minimum wage void, but has sought to secure its enforcement by making it a penal offense on the part of the employer to pay less than the minimum wage, and by giving to the employee a right of action to recover the difference between the wage actually paid and such minimum wage. The statute was not therefore intended solely for the benefit of the individual wage-earner. It was believed that the welfare of the public requires that wage-earners receive a wage sufficient for their decent maintenance. The statute being thus protective of the public as well as of the wage-earner, it must follow that any contract of settlement of a controversy arising out of a failure to pay the fixed minimum wage in which the state did not participate is voidable, if not void. Especially must this be so, as here, where the contract of settlement is executory, has been repudiated by one of the parties, the parties can be placed in statu quo, and the wage-earner, by carrying out the contract, will not receive the wage to which she is justly entitled.'

The Oregon minimum wage law for women--in all essentials the same as our law--was sustained in Stettler v. O'Hara, 69 Or. 519, 139 P. 743, L.R.A.1917C, 944, Ann.Cas.1916A, 217, and Simpson v. O'Hara, 70 Or. 261, 141 P. 158. These two cases were affirmed without an opinion by an equally divided court in Stettler v. O'Hara, 243 U.S. 629, 37 S.Ct. 475, 61 L.Ed. 937, Mr. Justice Brandeis taking no part in the consideration and decision of the cases. In Bunting v. Oregon, 243 U.S. 426, 37 S.Ct. 435, 61 L.Ed. 830, Ann.Cas.1918A, 1043, the United States Supreme Court sustained a wage-fixing statute. The statute limited the hours of labor of any person, whether man or woman, working in any mill, factory, or manufacturing establishment, to ten hours a day, with a priviso requiring such employees, if they worked more than ten hours a day, to accept for the three additional hours permitted not less than 50 per cent. more than their usual wage.

By act of September 19, 1918 (40 Stat. 960, c. 174), Congress provided for the fixing of minimum wages for women and children in the District of Columbia. The statute was declared unconstitutional on the ground that it authorizes an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract included within the guaranties of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525, 43 S.Ct. 394, 403, 67 L.Ed. 785, 24 A.L.R. 1238. Mr. Chief Justice Taft, dissenting, said:

'The boundary of the police power beyond which its exercise becomes an invasion of the guaranty of liberty under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution is not easy to mark. Our court has been laboriously engaged in pricking out a line in successive cases. We must be careful, it seems to me, to follow that line as well as we can, and not to depart from it by suggesting a distinction that is formal rather than real.

'Legislatures in limiting freedom of contract between employee and employer by a minimum wage proceed on the assumption that employees, in the class receiving least pay, are not upon a full level of equality of choice with their employer and in their necessitous circumstances are prone to accept pretty much anything that is offered. They are peculiarly subject to the overreaching of the harsh and greedy employer. The evils of the sweating system and of the long hours and low wages which are characteristic of it are well known. Now, I agree that it is a disputable question in the field of political economy how far a statutory requirement of maximum hours or minimum wages may be a useful remedy for these evils, and whether it may not make the case of the oppressed employee worse than it was Before . But it is not the function of this court to hold congressional acts invalid simply because they are passed to carry out economic views which the court believes to be unwise or unsound.

'Legislatures which adopt a requirement of maximum hours or minimum wages may be presumed to believe that when sweating employers are prevented from paying unduly low wages by positive law they will continue their business, abating that part of their profits, which were wrung from the necessities of their employees, and will concede the better terms required by the law, and that while in individual cases, hardship may result, the restriction will enure to the benefit of the general class of employees in whose interest the law is passed, and so to that of the community at large.

'The right of the Legislature under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to limit the hours of employment on the score of the health of the employee, it seems to me, has been firmly established. As to that, one would think, the line had been pricked out so that it has become a well formulated rule. In Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366, 18 S.Ct. 383, 42 L.Ed. 780, it was applied to miners and rested on the unfavorable environment of employment in mining and smelting. In Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 25 S.Ct. 539 49 L.Ed. 937, 3 Ann.Cas. 1133, it was held that restricting those employed in bakeries to 10 hours a day was an arbitrary and invalid interference with the liberty of contract secured by the Fourteenth...