As the United States Supreme Court ends its current term with several monumental decisions, it is fitting to remember Utican Joseph Lochner, who refused to follow a New York State statute in 1899 regarding the number of hours one could work in a bakery.

Little did he know that this refusal would set into motion a complete change in labor laws in the United States.

On May 2, 1895, New York Gov. Levi P. Morton, former vice president under President Benjamin Harrison, signed into law a limit on the number of hours employees in bakeries could work in a day and a week. The new “Bakeshop Act,” passed by the state legislature unanimously (119-0), limited employees to 10 hours per day, 60 hours total per week in a time when itinerant workers could/would sometimes work up to 100 total hours in a week.

The law was championed by progressives seeking social reforms and who felt that extended hours worked in a bakery subjected laborers to respiratory ailments. The Bakers’ Union, under the leadership of Henry Weismann, backed the law at its onset.

At 84 South St. in East Utica, a Bavarian immigrant and baker chose to ignore the law, not once but twice. In 1899, Joseph Lochner of Lochner’s Home Bakery, allowed one of his employees to work more than 60 hours in one week. He was arrested and fined $25 (approximately $715 in 2018). Two years later, Lochner was arrested again for being in violation of the same law. This time, the Oneida County Court fined him $50 ($1,430 in 2018) after a...

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