Which U.S. Supreme Court case upheld Washington’s minimum-wage law for women in 1937?

West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish upheld Washington’s minimum-wage law for women in 1937.

Elsie Parrish, a chambermaid, sued the West Coast Hotel Company for the difference between her wages and the minimum amount set under Washington law. The Supreme Court upheld the law in a 5–4 decision on March 29, 1937.

The ruling rejected the earlier approach represented by Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, which had treated minimum-wage regulation as an unconstitutional interference with freedom of contract. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes emphasized that bargaining power could be unequal and that workers might be unable to obtain a genuinely free agreement.

The decision is widely associated with the Supreme Court’s shift toward accepting broader economic regulation during the New Deal period. It also helped establish a constitutional foundation for government wage regulation, although later federal labor-law disputes have usually turned on statutory interpretation rather than this constitutional question.