The Waterbury Democrat., 1937-05-29

OupTeme NOuEts
 Washington, May 29.-The admin istration's minimum wage-maximum hour-child labor bill is the measure Roosevelt has had most in mind during his war on the supreme court.
 If the court can swallow this one 1t will have removed the most effective barriers which once were up against the New Deal program. And federal regulation will have taken its longest stride.
 Many of the barriers have been
 knocked down in the past few
 months. The big one remaining,
 legal experts say, is the Hammer
 vs. Dagenhart 5-to-4 decision,
 which in 1918 knocked out law
 prohibiting products made by
 child labor from moving in inter-
 state commerce.
 You could hear the boys whis- pering repeatedly about Hammer vs Dagenhart as they hammered and sawed on the Black Connery bill. Roosevelt, in his message to congress, quoted the dissenting opinion of the late Justice Holmes in the Hammer case. But he didn't quote the deciding majority opin- ion. And that's what the court must reverse if the New Deal is to have its wage-hour- child labor law. The present proposal would bar from interstate commerce products manufactured by chil- dren under 16 and by workers subjected to oppressive" wage and hour conditions as defined by congress.
 "The goods shipped are in themselves harmless" said MT. Justice Day in the majority opin- ion, thereby distinguishing them from such items as liquor, whose shipment into dry states was
 Production was not subject to federal control, Day insisted, and "the making of goods and the mining of coal are not commerce." Consequently, he held, the pro- duction of articles intended for interstate commerce was "an in- vasion by the federal power of the control of a matter purely local in character"
 And that reasoning still stands, although the child labor law ap- piled only to the welfare of ex- plotted children, and the proposed legislation is based on the claim that federal regulation of business is necessary for protection of the entire economic system.
 Getting Close to Line
 The court has been gliding close to Hammer vs. Dagenhart in recent decisions, however, and it would seem to require no great stretch of reasoning to get around 1t if five justices were so minded.
 In the recent Kentucky Whip and Collar case, wherein the court upheld by unanimous decision the Ashurst- Summers act prohibiting shipment of convict-made goods into states having laws against such goods, Chief Justice Hughes Opined:
 "The congress in exercising the power conf1ded to it by the Con- stitution is as free as the states to recognize the fundamental in- terests of free labor"
 Roosevelt cribbed the line when he said in his message to congress that Congress may exercise that power (to regulate commerce among the states) to recognize and protect the fundamental in- tereSts of free labor"
 Anyway, the New Deal legalists say that ought to help upset Ham mer vs. Dagenhart They also cite the majority reasoning in de- cisions calidating the Wagner labor act. Hughes in the Jones & Laughlin opinion recognized de- nial of collective bargaining as a possible means of obstructing in- terstate commerce but carefully avoided reference to wages and working conditions.
 Hughes did say, however:
 "The fact that employees here
 concerned were engaged in pro-
 ductiOn is not determinative."
 Attorneys for the corporation had insisted that it was.