Making Minimum Wage - Elsie Parrish versus the West Coast Hotel Company (Paperback)

The US Supreme Court's 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, upholding the constitutionality of Washington State's minimum wage law for women, had monumental consequences for all American workers. It also marked a major shift in the Court's response to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal agenda. In Making Minimum Wage, Helen J. Knowles tells the human story behind this historic case. West Coast Hotel v. Parrish pitted a Washington State hotel against a chambermaid, Elsie Parrish, who claimed that she was owed the state's minimum wage. The hotel argued that under the concept of "freedom of contract," the US Constitution allowed it to pay its female workers whatever low wages they were willing to accept. Knowles unpacks the legal complexities of the case while telling the litigants' stories. Drawing on archival and private materials, including the unpublished memoir of Elsie's lawyer, C. B. Conner, Knowles exposes the profound courage and resolve of the former chambermaid. Her book reveals why Elsie-who, in her mid-thirties was already a grandmother-was fired from her job at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, and why she undertook the outsized risk of suing the hotel for back wages. Minimum wage laws are "not an academic question or even a legal one," Elinore Morehouse Herrick, the New York director of the National Labor Relations Board, said in 1936. Rather, they are "a human problem." A pioneering analysis that illuminates the life stories behind West Coast Hotel v. Parrish as well as the case's impact on local, state, and national levels, Making Minimum Wage vividly demonstrates the fundamental truth of Morehouse Herrick's statement.

General

Imprint:	University of Oklahoma Press
Country of origin:	United States
Series:	Studies in American Constitutional Heritage
Release date:	August 2021
Authors:	Helen J. Knowles
Dimensions:	229 x 152 x 33mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	396
ISBN-13:	978-0-8061-6938-5
Categories:	Books > Law > Jurisprudence & general issues > Legal history Books > Humanities > History > American history > General Books > Law > Laws of other jurisdictions & general law > Financial, taxation, commercial, industrial law > Employment & labour law Books > Social sciences > Sociology, social studies > Gender studies > Women's studies > Feminism Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Service industries > Hospitality industry > General Books > History > American history > General
LSN:	0-8061-6938-9
Barcode:	9780806169385

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