West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish was a 1937 Supreme Court decision, decided 5–4, that upheld a Washington state minimum wage law for women and overturned decades of rulings that had treated wage and hour regulation as an unconstitutional interference with the freedom of contract. The ruling reversed Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, ended what is now called the Lochner era, and cleared the constitutional path for the federal Fair Labor Standards Act one year later.1Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937)
A Chambermaid, a Hotel, and $216.19
Elsie Parrish worked as a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, starting in the summer of 1933. She cleaned rooms and toilets on an irregular schedule until the hotel let her go in May 1935. Washington had a 1913 statute declaring that inadequate wages threatened the health and morals of women and minors, and an industrial welfare commission set under that law had fixed the minimum at $14.50 for a 48-hour workweek.2Washington State Legislature. Washington Session Laws 1913 – Chapter 1741Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937)
Parrish and her husband sued the West Coast Hotel Company for the difference between what she had been paid and what the state minimum required. The claim came to $216.19. The hotel did not contest the numbers. It attacked the law.
The Constitutional Question
The West Coast Hotel Company argued that Washington’s minimum wage law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Its theory rested on liberty of contract: the idea that an employer and a worker have a constitutionally protected right to agree on wages without the state stepping in. On that reading, telling a hotel what to pay a chambermaid was indistinguishable from taking property without due process.
The argument was not novel. It was the argument that had been winning at the Supreme Court for thirty years.
The Lochner-Era Precedent the Case Had to Overcome
Lochner v. New York, decided in 1905, struck down a state law limiting bakery workers to sixty hours a week as an unreasonable interference with the right to contract.3Justia. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905) From that point through the mid-1930s, the Court routinely invalidated economic regulations that touched wages or hours.
The most direct obstacle for Parrish was Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, a 1923 decision that had struck down a District of Columbia minimum wage law for women as an arbitrary interference with contractual freedom.4Justia. Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923) Just one term before Parrish, in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, the Court had leaned on Adkins to strike down a nearly identical state law.5Justia. Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, 298 U.S. 587 (1936) Elsie Parrish’s back-pay claim was, in practical terms, a challenge to that entire body of law.
The 5–4 Ruling
On March 29, 1937, the Court ruled for Parrish and upheld the Washington statute. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Brandeis, Stone, Cardozo, and Roberts.1Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937)
The decisive vote was Justice Owen Roberts, who had sided with the conservative bloc against the New York statute in Morehead just one term earlier. His shift from striking down a state minimum wage law to upholding one is among the most debated moves in the Court’s history.
Hughes’s Reasoning
Hughes took the freedom of contract argument on directly. The Constitution, he wrote, does not guarantee an absolute right to any wage bargain two parties can strike. Liberty under the Fourteenth Amendment is “necessarily subject to the restraints of due process, and regulation which is reasonable in relation to its subject and is adopted in the interests of the community is due process.”1Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937)
The supposed free negotiation between a large hotel and a lone chambermaid, Hughes wrote, was largely fiction. Employers and workers do not stand on equal footing, and a worker facing unemployment has little real bargaining power. The state’s police power, its authority to protect public health, safety, and welfare, extends to that imbalance.
The opinion’s most-quoted passage addressed the cost of doing nothing. Workers denied a living wage still need to eat and find shelter, and when private pay falls short, the community makes up the difference through public relief. “What these workers lose in wages the taxpayers are called upon to pay,” Hughes wrote, and the community was not bound to provide “a subsidy for unconscionable employers.”6Legal Information Institute. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish The line reframed minimum wage law not as government overreach but as a refusal to let private industry shift labor costs onto the public.
The majority did not stop at distinguishing older cases. Hughes wrote plainly: “The case of Adkins v. Children’s Hospital should be, and it is, overruled.”1Justia. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937) With that sentence, the presumption against economic regulation that had defined constitutional law for a generation was gone.
Sutherland’s Dissent
Justice George Sutherland, writing for himself and Justices Van Devanter, McReynolds, and Butler, argued from a fundamentally different view of the judicial role.6Legal Information Institute. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish The Constitution’s meaning, he insisted, is fixed at the time of adoption. It applies to new circumstances, but its meaning does not shift with the economy or with public sentiment. If the Depression made people want more regulation, the answer was an amendment, not a new reading by five justices.
The dissent has an internal logic that has kept it alive as a reference point. Sutherland was making a structural claim about the rule of law: a text that changes meaning whenever conditions feel urgent enough restrains nothing.
Court-Packing and the “Switch in Time”
The ruling arrived in the middle of a fight between President Franklin Roosevelt and the Court. On February 5, 1937, after years of watching the justices strike down New Deal programs, Roosevelt had proposed a bill that would have let him appoint one new justice for every sitting justice over age 70, up to six additional seats.7Federal Judicial Center. FDR’s “Court-Packing” Plan The purpose was to load the bench with justices friendlier to federal economic regulation.
Because Parrish came down soon after, observers coined the phrase “the switch in time that saved nine,” treating Roberts’s vote as a response to the political pressure. The timeline complicates the story. The justices had voted on Parrish in conference before Roosevelt announced the court-packing plan, so whatever moved Roberts, it was not a direct reaction to the February proposal. Congress ultimately rejected the plan, but the Court’s new posture toward economic regulation made the confrontation largely moot.
What the Case Changed
Parrish told every lower court that the old framework, in which economic regulation was presumed unconstitutional and the government carried the burden of justifying it, was finished. Legislatures would now receive broad deference when passing labor and welfare laws, and courts would uphold economic regulation unless it was clearly irrational.
Congress moved quickly. On June 25, 1938, Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the first federal minimum wage at 25 cents per hour and capped the standard workweek at 44 hours.8U.S. Department of Labor. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage When the FLSA was challenged, the Supreme Court upheld it in United States v. Darby in 1941, citing Parrish directly and stating that after the decision “it is no longer open to question that the fixing of a minimum wage is within the legislative power.”9Justia. United States v. Darby, 312 U.S. 100 (1941)
Elsie Parrish sued her former employer over roughly $216 in back pay. The case that grew from that claim redefined the constitutional relationship between government, employers, and workers, and every federal and state wage law that followed rests on the ground it cleared.