Smith v. Brooke
| Decision Date | 13 March 1865 |
| Citation | 49 Pa. 147 |
| Parties | Smith, Garnishee of Hipple, <I>versus</I> Brooke. |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
Dr. Smith employed Adam Hipple, a master carpenter, to build a house, and agreed to pay him $1.50 the day for his own labour, and $1 a day for each of his hands; and from this per diem of the hands, Hipple was to receive assessments varying from five to fifty cents a day for each hand, according to the degree of supervision they would respectively require. On the trial of the cause the per diem for Hipple's own labour was ascertained to amount to $463.50 — a fund which the court held to be exempted from attachment-execution by the Act of Assembly of June 16th 1836, § 37, Purd. 435. The assessments on the wages of the hands amounted to another fund of $493.37, which the court held to be liable to attachment; and the two first errors assigned raise the question, whether the court erred in holding this latter fund to be subject to attachment.
Both in Heebner v. Chave, 5 Barr 117, and in Costello v. The Coal Co., 9 Casey 241, the "wages of labourers," which the statute was designed to protect, were defined to be the earnings of the labourer, by his personal manual toil, and not the profits which the contractor derives from the labour of others. The cases illustrate the distinction between the two kinds of gains or rewards. It is the difference between the sale of your own labour, and a sale of another man's labour, at something more than you pay for it. What is received for another's labour over and above what is paid for it is called profit, and such profits were held not to be within the protection of the statute.
We think this ruling was right. The statute secures to the labourer and his family the earnings of his own hands; but this is its full extent and scope. If it were carried farther by judicial decision, it would be hard to assign a limit to its operation. The profits of every enterprise might be called the wages of labour, with no great violence to language, and thus the collection of debts be abolished in many instances where ample means of payment existed. The legislature meant nothing so unreasonable and extravagant. They only meant that, what a man earned by...
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