44 Hours Out

When the New Deal was really new, Franklin Roosevelt announced early and often that one of his aims was to legislate a floor under wages, a ceiling over work hours. While he was trying to make good with NRA, and losing to the U. S. Supreme Court, another New Dealer was promising the same kind of legislation to Pennsylvania. Last week Governor (and U. S. Senator-nominate) George Howard Earle, having partially made good with a 44-hour week law, passed in 1937, but never put in effect, encountered the as yet unreconstructed Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Affecting Pennsylvania employers and 1,500,000 male industrial workers (a separate Earle measure limits the work week of 800,000 women), the Earle law: 1) restricted the week to 5 1/2 eight-hour days; 2) permitted so much administrative flexibility that the Pennsylvania Department of Labor & Industry could in effect write its own statute to cover individual cases.

This last was the respect in which the Earle law provided a parallel to the new Federal Wages-&-Hours Bill. And it was the respect in which it failed to pass the court. Including H. Edgar Barnes. Earle's appointee and the only Democrat on the bench, the seven justices ruled as though they were paraphrasing the U. S. Supreme Court's NRA opinion: that a legislature cannot legally "abdicate, transfer or delegate" its powers to an administrator.

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