<P> As of January 2017, Massachusetts and Washington have the highest state minimum wage at $11.00 per hour . There is a racial difference for support of a higher minimum wage with most black and Hispanic individuals supporting a $15.00 federal minimum wage, and 54% of whites opposing it . In 2015, about three percent of white, Asian, and Hispanic or Latino workers earned the federal minimum wage or less . Among black workers, the percentage was about four percent . </P> <P> In 1912, Massachusetts organized a commission to recommend non-compulsory minimum wages for women and children . Within eight years, at least thirteen U.S. states and the District of Columbia would pass minimum wage laws, with pressure being placed on state legislatures by the National Consumers League in a coalition with other women's voluntary associations and organized labor . The United States Supreme Court of the Lochner era consistently invalidated compulsory minimum wage laws . Advocates for these minimum wage laws hoped that they would be upheld under the precedent of Muller v. Oregon, which upheld maximum working hours laws for women on the grounds that women required special protection that men did not . However, the Court did not extend this principle to minimum wage laws, considering the latter as interfering with the ability of employers to freely negotiate wage contracts with employees . </P> <P> In 1933, the Roosevelt administration made the first attempt at establishing a national minimum wage, when a $0.25 per hour standard was set as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act . However, in the 1935 court case Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (295 U.S. 495), the US Supreme Court declared the act unconstitutional, and the minimum wage was abolished . In 1938, the minimum wage was re-established pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act, once again at $0.25 per hour ($4.78 in 2017 dollars). In 1941, the Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act in United States v. Darby Lumber Co., holding that Congress had the power under the Commerce Clause to regulate employment conditions . </P> <P> The 1938 minimum wage law only applied to "employees engaged in interstate commerce or in the production of goods for interstate commerce," but in amendments in 1961 and 1966, the federal minimum wage was extended (with slightly different rates) to employees in large retail and service enterprises, local transportation and construction, state and local government employees, as well as other smaller expansions; a grandfather clause in 1990 drew most employees into the purview of federal minimum wage policy, which now set the wage at $3.80 . </P>

When was the minimum wage established in the us