The Washington times., 1938-07-07
WAGE-HOUR BILL
Constitutional
SAYS new DEAL
OK by Court Predicted
By Legal Minds
BY EDWARD B. LOCKETT

BY EDWARD B. LOCKETT
d.N.SO Because the Supreme
Courts application Of the term
interstate commerce has materi-
ally broadened over the past few
years, legal minds within and
sympathetic to the Administration
have privately predicted that the
new wage-hour act will pass mus
ter as constitutional.
There is considerable doubt, even
among the most staunch support
erS of the act, whether its child
labor provisions will stand up, but
their invalidation alone would not
tear down the structure of the
basic law.
NEW METHOD
Since early in the Roosevelt
administration. when number
Of laws were declared unconstitu-
tional because Of some one indi-
vidual provision, New Deal bill
drafterS have carefully inserted
in each piece of legislation the
provision that if any single sec
ton is found invalid, the re-
mainded of the act shall not be
affected. Such a provision is in
the wage-hour act.
Industrial economists have as
serted since enactment OF the
wage-hour law that it meant a re-
turn of NRA, and the Manufac-
turers News Bureau here predicted
that washington will live through
another NRA confusion on small
SCALE" Despite these charges,
there have been remarkably few
predictions that the bill would be
thrown out by the courts, as was
the NRA.
VITAL DIFFERENCE
Government analysts and econ
omists explained that while there
was similarity between NRA and
the operation of the wage-hour
act, a vital difference existed
which, they said, would give the
wage-hour act constitutionality.
NRA, they recalled, was held a
too broad delegation Of power by
Congress, in that it permitted the
fixing of hours and wages by
agencies other than the Congress.
In the case of the wage-hour
act, the New Deal lawyers argued,
there is no such delegation of
power. Congress, they hold, has
fixed the hours and wages by ap-
plication of the interstate COM
merce clause, between certain
limits, and has simply delegated
the wage-hour administration to
be set up to exercise some flex-
ibility between those specified
limits.
DIFFERENT LEGALLY
''That," said Leon Henderson,
q Federal economist, "is a very
different thing legally from
simply directing some agency to
set up and enforce its own ideas
Of wage and hour standards"
There is no doubt here that the
act will be thoroughly tested in
the courts after it begins operat-
ing late in October.
Congressional sponsors of the
anti-child labor section of the act
believe that section would be up
held by the Supreme Court. They
said the high courts decision up
holding constitutionality of the
Wagner.Labor Relations act indi-
Gated support Of the child labor
ban.
However, in order to do so the
court must reverse a 20-year.old
decision, for in June, 1918, it held
invalid a law on which the pro-
visions in the wage hour act were
patterned. Justice Brandeis, still
sitting on the court, dissented in
the 1918 case, and Justice Hugo
Black, when he was chairman Of
the Senate Labor Committee,
urged a challenge Of the 1918 rul-
ing.
PLANS READY
Both business and labor have
worked out tentative plans to ask
Congress for amendments to the
wage.hour act, but these have
not as yet cryStallized into specific
proposals. The American Fedora
tion of Labor was only partly salts
fled and may be expected to come
to Congress next year suggesting
changes in the method Of ad-
ministering the law.
The AFL wanted simple floor
on wages and a ceiling on hours,
without differentials, and with no
wage boards to exercise flexibility
in the law.
John L. Lewis CIO backed the
wages-hour bill, but he accepted
it as a beginning" rather than
anything permanent, and will be
heard next year supporting moves
to raise the wage floor and lower
the hour standards.
US. Scientists Lauded.