Massachusetts going first in 1912. Within a decade, fifteen states and the District of Columbia had minimum-wage laws on their books. This was the Progressive Era, and proponents said that workers were being exploited and needed more bargaining power. Employers disagreed, and challenged the laws in court on the grounds that they “violated employers’ constitutional rights to enter freely into contracts and deprived them of their private property (i.e., their profits) without due process,
