Adkins v. Children's Hospital of Columbia
The Supreme Court struck down a federal law that set minimum wages for women workers in Washington, D.C., ruling that it violated the constitutional right to freely negotiate the terms of a job.
The decision blocked a major tool of Progressive-Era labor reform, holding that the government could regulate hours of work but not the wage itself, a distinction the dissenting justices called artificial and indefensible.
How it got here: A D.C. trial court denied injunctions; the D.C. Court of Appeals reversed on rehearing and struck down the law, and the trial court then entered final decrees the board appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Congress created a board to set minimum wages for women and minors working in Washington, D.C. A children's hospital had agreed to pay some female employees less than the board's minimum, and a young elevator operator wanted to keep working for wages below the minimum because she needed the job and was satisfied with the terms. Both sued to block enforcement of the board's wage order.
The question before the Court
Could Congress set a minimum wage that women in the District of Columbia had to be paid, even over their own objection to the deal?
Why it matters
The ruling meant women workers and their employers in the District of Columbia could no longer be forced to comply with a government-set wage floor, and it cast doubt on similar minimum-wage laws in other states. For over a decade afterward, minimum-wage legislation for women faced serious constitutional risk until the Court reversed course in 1937.
What changes now
The decision was final on the merits and immediately barred enforcement of the District of Columbia minimum-wage law for women. It effectively discouraged similar minimum-wage legislation nationwide for over a decade, until the Supreme Court reversed course in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish in 1937, upholding a state minimum-wage law and overruling the reasoning in this case.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Congress could ever regulate wages in businesses affected with a public interest or during genuine emergencies, and it left open whether a minimum wage for adult men could be valid, addressing only wage-fixing for adult women who were legally free to contract for themselves.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Taft
Chief Justice Taft argued there is no meaningful constitutional difference between regulating maximum hours (already upheld) and regulating minimum wages, since both are simply terms of the same employment bargain. He would have upheld the law as a reasonable exercise of the police power to protect workers with little bargaining leverage, while expressly declining to say whether a minimum wage for men would also be valid.
Dissent — Justice Holmes
“I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work.”Holmes's core objection that hours and wages are not meaningfully different kinds of contract terms.
Justice Holmes argued Congress's power to address poor health and living conditions among women workers was clear, and that 'liberty of contract' was a judicially invented doctrine not found in the Constitution's text. He saw no principled distinction between fixing maximum hours and fixing minimum wages, and would have upheld the law as a reasonable, widely-supported policy choice for lawmakers to make.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court treated freedom to negotiate the terms of a job as part of the 'liberty' protected by the Fifth Amendment's due process clause, meaning restrictions on that freedom are only allowed in exceptional circumstances.
- The Court reviewed categories of cases where wage or contract regulation had previously been upheld — businesses serving the public, government contracts, wage-payment mechanics, and maximum-hours laws — and found none of them applied here, because this law fixed the wage itself rather than regulating hours or payment methods.
- The Court concluded that any special legal treatment of women's contracts based on physical or social differences from men had lost much of its force following the Nineteenth Amendment's grant of political equality, so adult women could not be given contract restrictions that would be unconstitutional if applied to men.
- The Court found the wage-setting standard itself too vague to apply consistently, since the 'cost of living' needed to support a woman varies enormously between individuals and was not tied to the value of the work performed.
- Because the law ignored the employer's ability to pay and the worker's actual output, and instead shifted what the Court saw as a social welfare burden onto individual employers, the Court held the law was an arbitrary price-fixing scheme with no proper constitutional basis.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Lochner v. New York (198 U.S. 45)
The Court relied on Lochner's reasoning that liberty of contract limits government interference with employment terms.
Limits Muller v. Oregon (208 U.S. 412)
The Court said sex-based reasoning from this hours-of-labor case had lost much force after the Nineteenth Amendment.
Distinguishes Bunting v. Oregon (243 U.S. 426)
The Court treated this hours-of-labor ruling as inapplicable because it did not involve fixing wages.