Hammer v. Dagenhart

The people who wanted to pass child labor laws thought they saw a way around this problem. They wanted to pass federal legislation outlawing child labor so that no state would be at a particular disadvantage, since it would not face competition from any other state.

The problem was that, under the Tenth Amendment, states are supposed to have all power that the Constitution does not specifically give to the federal government. Making a national law to regulate labor conditions would seem to be in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

Representative Edward Keating and Senator Robert L. Owen thought they saw a way around this problem. Their Keating-Owen Act attacked child labor on a federal level through a kind of back door. Rather than dealing directly with contracts or working conditions, the Keating-Owen Act dealt with interstate commerce, which everyone agreed was the province of the federal government. The Keating-Owen Act prohibited the shipment of any products that both were shipped from state to state and were made in factories or mines that employed children under age 14, or that allowed children between ages 14 and 16 to work more than eight hours a day. This also included employers that required children to work six days a week, after 7 p.m., or before 6 a.m. The act also said that no products could be shipped from an establishment where those labor conditions had occurred within 30 days prior to the goods being shipped.