Minimum Wage
a term applied to legislation tending to limit the downward tendency of wages, usually in favor of women. It is a part of that class of legislation which has been the entering wedge in the disruption of the old individualist principle that the field of industry and economics should be left entirely to free competition, or the law of supply and demand. It was in the Australian colony of Victoria that the first minimum wage legislation was enacted, with results so satisfactory to organized labor and its sympathizers that it became the subject of further agitation in Great Britain and the United States, beginning about 1905. By 1920 minimum wage statutes had been enacted in Ariz., Ark., Cal., Col., Utah, Wash., Wis., Dist. of Col., Kans., Mass., Minn., N. D., Oreg., and P. R. Because of constitutional limitations, as defined by the courts, it applies only to women and children. In Utah direct laws have been enacted, regulating minimum wage MINING scales, while in other States the actual regulation is left to special commissions, with power to adapt the regulation to changing economic conditions.