Worker safety and hours laws

In re Boyce – Nevada, 1904 (71 P. 1); In re Kair – Nevada, 1905 (80 P. 463); Keefe v. People – Colorado, 1906 (87 P. 791); State v. Livingston Concrete Building & Manufacturing Co. – Montana, 1906 (87 P. 980)

Home on the Range

Sweet v. Ballentine – Idaho, 1902 (69 P. 995); Pyramid Land & Stock Co. v. Pierce – Nevada, 1908 (95 P. 210); State v. Omaechevviaria - Idaho, 1915 (159 P. 280), affirmed, 246 U.S. 343 (1918);  Bountiful City v. De Luca – Utah, 1930 (292 P. 194); Allen v. Bailey – Colorado, 1932 (14 P.2d 1087)

• Several Rocky Mountain courts considered substantive due process challenges to a unique regional reform:  sheep grazing laws.  Sheep, which were plentiful in the northern Rockies, were notorious for eating vegetation down to the roots and ruining grazing land for farming; the grazing laws were designed to limit this harm by limiting their range.  In Sweet and Omaechevviaria, sheep owners challenged an Idaho law prohibiting grazing within two miles of inhabited areas, and in Pyramid they challenged a similar Nevada law.  The two states’ supreme courts had little difficulty upholding such laws as reasonable exercises of state police power. 

• DeLuca, decided at the end of the era, presented a more complicated problem; could a municipal utility that wanted to use a river as a power source, prevent  goats from grazing upstream and polluting the river?  Utah’s supreme court struck a balance, holding that the utility could not prevent the upstream herd owner from grazing altogether but that the owner must limit his goats’ pollution as much as possible.   And in Bailey, Colorado’s supreme court  upheld a law allocating public grazing lands between cattle and sheep owners.  The court held the allocation was a reasonable police regulation and even applied to federal land in the absence of any conflicting federal law.

• In most late-19^th-century American factories conditions were dangerous, safety devices were few and serious injuries occurred with alarming frequency.  Early tort laws made it difficult for injured workers to obtain compensation from their employers, but the tide of worker lawsuits grew steadily and by the early 1900s there was consensus, even among employers, that a new system of compensating workers for injuries had to be found. 

• All of the Rocky Mountain states enacted workers compensation laws starting in 1912.  The laws made employers liable for worker injuries regardless of fault:  workers were guaranteed a modest compensation for their injuries without the need to sue their employer; employers had to pay regardless of fault, but they were insulated from the risk of high jury awards.

• Employers challenged such laws in many states, usually arguing that imposition of liability without their consent deprived them of freedom of contract and of their property without due process of law.  Rocky Mountain employers did not challenge such laws except in Montana.  In Cunningham, Montana’s supreme court struck down a 1909 statute that created a modified workers compensation system for coal miners, but it did so only because the law permitted employees to collect benefits and sue their employers for additional damages.  The court praised the general principles of workers compensation laws and made clear that if this one flaw were corrected, it would have no further objections to workers compensation.