Court Opinion

ID: 9418323
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:21:23.303294+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:00.631703
License: Public Domain

*360Mr. Justice McKenna,
concurring.
It is the contention of the Government that the act is an hours-of-service law, the intent of Congress being by its enactment “to proclaim a substantial eight-hour day.” The opposing contention is that “the language of the act shows that it deals solely with the construction of contracts and with the standard and amount of compensation, and not with any limitation upon the hours of labor.”
Upon these opposing contentions the parties respectively assert and deny the power of Congress to enact the law. The Government, however, further contends that, even viewing the law as a wage law, Congress under the commerce clause had power to pass it.
My purpose is to deal with the meaning of the act. With the consideration of the power to pass it I am satisfied with the opinion.
The title of the act (and to the title of an act we may resort to resolve ambiguity or to confirm its words) expresses its purpose to be “to establish an eight-hour day for employees of carriers engaged in interstate and foreign commerce, and for other purposes.”
The description of the title was repeated in the House of Representatives by the chairman of the committee who reported the bill and from whom it has received its designation. Among other things, he said: “The law fixes an eight-hour day. We had previously a sixteen-hour day. and a nine-hour day. We now have an eight-hour day. The only reference to wages is in the language used to hold in statu quo until the workings of the eight-hour law could be observed and all other features of the service adjusted to the eight-hour law.” Explanations of like import were made in the Senate.
The words of the act, I think, support this characterization and it may be assumed were accepted by Congress as expressing and securing it; and I think they do so with *361fair directness. Whatever involution there may be in them was caused by the situation to which they were addressed, derangement of which was sought to be avoided, the situation indeed made use of, “features of the service adjusted” to the law.
The provision of § 1 is: “That, beginning January first, nineteen hundred and seventeen, eight hours shall, in contracts for labor and service, be deemed a day’s work and the measure or standard of a day’s work for the purpose of reckoning the compensation for services of all employees who are now or may hereafter be employed by any common carrier by railroad, except . . . ”
Nothing is fixed but the time of service — the hours which shall be deemed a day’s work — the number to be eight. All else — compensation and conditions — is left to contract; only, whatever the compensation, it shall be for a service of eight hours reckoned (computed) or measured by such time as its determining factor. Except as so determined the compensation may be whatever the carriers and employees may agree upon. Their power of convention has no other limitation.
The distinction between what is left to the parties and what is fixed by the law' is real. There is certainly a difference between the prescription of the time of service and the prescription of compensation for the service, and the difference is observed in the speech and conduct of men; it is observed in the regulations of legislation. It has never been supposed that the agitation for an eight-hour day for labor or the legislation which has responded to it, was intended to fix or did fix the rate of wages to be paid.
Of course, in a sense, the two things are related. The time of service and the price of service may be said to be the reciprocals of each other — each the price of the other. There can be no real estimate of the wages one receives until it is understood what time one has worked to receive *362them. They rise and fall with the increase or decrease of the time of service. One who works ten hours a day for $5.00 may be said to get less than one who works eight hours for the same sum. The labor of the latter is of greater value to. him than the labor of the ten-hour man is to him. And, correspondingly, the expense to the employer is greater in the one case than in the other, though the wages he pays, expressed in terms of money, are the same. It may be contended that there is no element, therefore, in the regulation of the price of labor that there is not in the regulation of the hours of labor. But, as I have said, in the practice of men and in the examples of legislation, regulation of one is not regarded as the regulation of the other. In certain hazardous employments the hours of labor have been prescribed. It has not been supposed, certainly not declared, that the power as exerted was the regulation of wages. The interest of the State has been assumed to terminate with the hours of service, and its compensation, therefore, has been left to the agreement of the parties.
As examples of legislation I may adduce Holden v. Hardy, 169 U. S. 366, where a state law was sustained, and Baltimore & Ohio R. R. Co. v. Interstate Commerce Commission, 221 U. S. 612, where a law of Congress was sustained. Both laws limited the hours of service, but neither the rate of wages. There may be also cited Ellis v. United States, 206 U. S. 246; Muller v. Oregon, 208 U. S. 412; Bosley v. McLaughlin, 236 U. S. 385; Miller v. Wilson, 236 U. S. 373.
It may be contended that the power that can limit the hours of service can fix the wages for the service. To this I shall presently refer. My immediate purpose is the interpretation of the law undér review, and I have only to point out that it is the sense of the practical world that prescribing the hours of labor is not prescribing the wages of labor, and Congress has kept the purposes distinct.
*363I do not think that other provisions of the act militate against these views. Section 2 provides for the appointment of a commission to observe the operation of the law, and this for the reason I have expressed of the dependence of the cost of the services upon the time they are rendered. The shorter hours may or may not involve an increase of expense to the roads and may or may not require recompense by an increase of their rates.
Pending the report of the commission and for thirty days thereafter it is provided (§ 3) that compensation shall not be reduced below the present standard day’s wage, and for all necessary time in excess of eight hours employees shall be paid at a rate not less than the pro rata rate for such standard eight-hour work day.
In a sense, this may be considered as a prescription of wages. To those roads (85%) that have a ten-hour standard the provision, so far as applicable, may be said to be a change of compensation. To those (15%) having an eight-hour standard it is not'a change. The effort of the law is to secure an eight-hour day service and the “penalty of payment for overtime service,” to quote the Government’s brief, “is imposed in order to enforce obedience to the eight-hour provision, as far as practicable.”
But even if § 3 be given a broader effect it would not give character to the whole act and make it the exertion of power to establish permanently a rate of wages. To so consider it would, I think, be contrary to the intention of Congress and convert the expediency for a particular occasion and condition into the rule for all occasions and conditions.
So far as the fate of the pending appeal is concerned, it is not of much importance whether the act be held to be an hours-of-service law or a wage-regulating law; but one may be regarded as having consequences that the other has not. To a carrier a wage law is but an item in its accounts, and requiring, it may be, an adjustment of its *364operations, the expense to be recompensed through its rates. If it be said that rates cannot be changed at will but only by permission of authority, I cannot think that permission will not be given if it be necessary to fulfill the command of the law. Indeed, if not given, the law might encounter constitutional restriction.
To an employee a wage law may be of more vital consequence, be of the very essence of his life, involving factors — many and various — which he alone can know and estimate, and which, besides, might not have an enduring constancy and be submissive to a precedent judgment. There well might be hesitation to displace him and substitute the determination of the law for his action.
I speak only of intention; of the power I have no doubt. When one enters into interstate commerce one enters into a service in which the public has an interest and subjects one’s self to its behests. And this is no limitation of liberty; it is the consequence of liberty exercised, the obligation of his undertaking, and constrains no more than any contract constrains. The obligation of a contract is the law under which it is made and submission to regulation is the condition which attaches to one who enters into or accepts employment in a business in which the public has an interest.
I concur in the answer of the opinion to the contentions of inequality of the law and the deprivation to the carriers of due process.