Journey to the eight-hour day
Labor Day is the perfect time to reflect on an Oregon milestone that launched a thousand briefs

Monday, September 01, 2008 The Oregonian

I n 1905, a Portland laundry worker complained that her boss was breaking state law. He was forcing her to work more than 10 hours a day.

Laundries, back then, were boiler rooms crammed with dangerous machinery, where disgustingly soiled clothes had to be sorted, bleached, soaped, rinsed, starched and ironed. From sunup past sundown, for wages of $10 a week or less, workers -- often very young or elderly women -- endured debilitating humidity, blisters, burns, chemical exposure and exhaustion, only to get up and do it all over again the next day.

At the turn of the century, Oregon progressives tailored a new law to limit the suffering by standardizing a 10-hour day. But the paternalistic law only applied to some Oregon workers -- women. In words that make us cringe today, the state argued it had a special interest in protecting women because they were weaker, more vulnerable to injury and either were, or might eventually become, mothers.

Backward as it now sounds, you have to consider the context. In the early 19th century, even children worked in factories. In 1833, it was hailed as a milestone when Britain restricted children working in textile mills to 12-hour days.

Other nations and states had also approved some workday limits before Oregon did. But many in America believed the U.S. Constitution guaranteed a "liberty of contract," including an unrestricted right to sell or purchase labor. On similar grounds, Portland laundry owner Curt Muller decided to test the new Oregon law, taking his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1908, the court ruled against him, and in favor of the 10-hour day. A woman's "physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage which justifies a difference in legislation," the court wrote. "As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical wellbeing of woman is an object of public interest. The regulation of her hour of labor falls within the police power of the state."

The New York Times was quick to note that Muller v. Oregon pitted one progressive movement against another, writing, "We leave it to the advocates of women suffrage to say whether this decision makes for, or against, the success of their cause."

But the Muller case is notable for another reason, too. It helped seal the fame of attorney Louis Brandeis, destined himself to become a Supreme Court justice. Brandeis' brief in favor of the 10-hour day was a sociological tour de force, commanding every statistic from every study then known, around the world, to prove the degrading effect of a too-long workday.

The trend that Brandeis launched, still known as the "Brandeis brief," overwhelms justices not with legal arguments, but with factual information documenting and quantifying real lives, and real suffering.

In any case, though, we shouldn't let this Labor Day go by without a nod to the 100th anniversary of Muller -- an Oregon milestone -- on the road to the eight-hour day.

Ultimately, it helped to push the nation in 1938 to approve the Fair Labor Standards Act. And with that act, limits on working hours finally -- and happily -- applied to both sexes.