West Coast Hotel v. Parrish - "Switch in Time" Supreme Court Upholds State Minimum Wage Law

On March 29, 1937, the Supreme Court rules 5-4 in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish to uphold Washington State’s minimum wage law for women, explicitly overruling its 1923 Adkins v. Children’s Hospital precedent and marking the beginning of the “Constitutional Revolution of 1937.” Justice Owen Roberts, who had voted to strike down a virtually identical New York minimum wage law just nine months earlier in Morehead v. New York ex rel. Tipaldo, provides the crucial fifth vote—the “switch in time that saved nine” attributed to Roosevelt’s court-packing threat.

Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Washington, sued to recover the difference between her wages and the state minimum wage of $14.50 per week. The hotel argued that the minimum wage law violated the “liberty of contract” protected by the Due Process Clause—the same doctrine the Court had used to invalidate labor regulations for decades during the “Lochner era.” Chief Justice Hughes’s majority opinion explicitly rejects liberty of contract reasoning, declaring that “the Constitution does not speak of freedom of contract” and that the state may protect workers from exploitation by employers with superior bargaining power.

The decision represents a fundamental shift in constitutional interpretation, abandoning decades of judicial protection for “economic liberty” that had shielded business interests from worker protection laws. The four conservative justices dissent, with Justice Sutherland arguing that the majority is abandoning constitutional principles under political pressure. Legal historians debate whether Roberts’s vote shift was truly responsive to the court-packing threat (announced February 5, 1937) or reflected a genuine change in judicial philosophy, noting that the justices’ conference vote occurred before Roosevelt’s announcement. Regardless of Roberts’s motivations, West Coast Hotel and the subsequent New Deal decisions that spring mark the end of judicial obstruction of economic regulation, establishing that democratic majorities may enact worker protection legislation without constitutional impediment—a settlement that largely holds until the Supreme Court’s renewed hostility to economic regulation in the 21st century.