THE NEW YORK FACTORY INVESTIGATING COMMISSION AND THE MINIMUM WAGE MOVEMENT.

The minimum-wage movement on the state level followed a meteoric course in the early twentieth century. In 1911 Wisconsin lawmakers introduced the first bill. The next year Massachusetts became the first state to enact a minimum-wage law for women and children. With some variation eight states had copied Massachusetts by 1913. While New York did not pass such a law, the New York State Factory Investigating Commission (1911-1915) wrote an important chapter in the broader story of the minimum-wage drive during the Progressive Era. Its investigation into wages continued to influence the minimum-wage movement at both the state and national levels, through the 1930s. In the United States progressives restricted their proposals to women and minors because of the tenuous constitutionality of minimum-wage statutes. Opponents of minimum-wage laws would certainly challenge them in the courts as a denial of property rights and, hence, interference with individual liberty. The initial impetus for the minimum-wage movement came from the Consumers' League. Its leaders had urged merchants voluntarily to apply minimum rates to female employees during the 1890's. By 1913 the reformers' drive led to investigations that had successfully persuaded the legislators in nine states to establish minimum-wage acts. The statutes varied. Reformers had not neglected New York. In their early campaigns for voluntary action, Consumers' League leaders had pressured New York. Nationally, the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (F.L.S.A.) crowned the minimum-wage movement. Congress passed this law as a result of the 1935 Supreme Court decision against the N.I.R.A. It provided for flat minimum-wage rates, originally 25 cents an hour, but to go up to 40 cents in seven years.