By Leonard Paulasa
In her years researching the social origins of the minimum wage in the Western world, historian, author, and professor at SUNY at Binghamton Kathryn Kish Sklar discovered that American labor pioneer Florence Kelley’s efforts in the late 19th century to protect women and children in factories led to the minimum wage in America.
“She was 100% the reason we have minimum wage,” Sklar said in a recent UC Santa Barbara lecture hosted by the Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy and the History Department.
While Sklar said she doesn’t have concrete answers to the exact origin of the minimum wage, her research led her to Kelley’s contribution. The Berkshire Prize-winning author of the book Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 credited Kelley’s fight for the rights of women and children laborers as a key historical step toward to the minimum wage and labor laws we have in America.
Sklar said that Kelley had been greatly influenced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who are considered the fathers of socialism. “I decided to revisit the history of capitalism and that led me to the Germans [Marx and Engels],” Sklar said.
She focused on the second chapter of her book, which she had shared with the audience a week prior to the event. In this chapter, Sklar said that Kelley had held capitalist views on economics until she studied the works of Marx and Engels and her interest in socialism grew during her time studying in Germany. It peaked when she translated Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 to English, the version widely used today.
Kelley came back to America a socialist, and would move from New York to Chicago “She moved to Chicago to leave her abusive husband,” said Sklar. There Kelley fought for a woman’s right to become a factory inspector, and it was her appointment as the first woman factory inspector in the United States that set in motion efforts toward a minimum wage.
Kelley fought for better labor laws and a minimum wage for women and children in factories and legislation was passed in 1918, but, “you guessed it, it was eventually ruled unconstitutional in 1923,” Sklar was quick to add. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the law unconstitutional in the 1923 landmark case, Adkins vs. Children’s Hospital, which argued that minimum wage laws for women violated due process.
Tom Steel, a UCSB philosophy student, said he got a lot out of the presentation. “She was jumping around in a whole lot of aspects of her work, showing the depth and nuances of the question she’s answering,” Steel said. “I didn't know anything about this before, and now I know a whole bunch more.”
UCSB history professor Nelson Lichtenstein attended the talk and said Sklar’s research has given him new insight about a key figure in American labor history. “[It’s] The intimate connection between Kelley and the work of Marx, and Engels in particular,” said Lichtenstein, who organized the event. “The whole point of her talk, and the intimate and influential connection Marx and Engels had on Florence Kelley, who’s usually just thought of as a woman reformer in the early 20th century… I didn’t even know that.”
Leonard Paulasa is a third year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Communication.