The Guffey-Snyder Act was a law, officially known as the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935, passed in the United States in 1935 under Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. It created the Bituminous Coal Commission to set the price of coal, in order to protect the industry from low competitive rates, and end other unfair practices of competition. The law also created the Bituminous Coal Labor Board to regulate maximum work hours and minimum wages. It was later ruled to be unconstitutional because, by giving power to the federal government to control prices, it infringed upon the economic liberty of free enterprise.
It was replaced in 1937 with the Guffey-Vinson Coal Act, which the Supreme Court did find constitutional. The act resurrected the Bituminous Coal Commission and reinstated the provisions regulation price fixing and unfair practices, but removed the labor provisions of the previous act. In 1939, the Bituminous Coal Commission was abolished and its duties were transferred to the US Department of Interior.
Famous quotes containing the words coal and/or act:
“Coal is a portable climate. It carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle; and it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted. Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret, that a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile, and coal carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Once women begin to question the inevitability of their subordination and to reject the conventions formerly associated with it, they can no longer retreat to the safety of those conventions. The woman who rejects the stereotype of feminine weakness and dependence can no longer find much comfort in the cliché that all men are beasts. She has no choice except to believe, on the contrary, that men are human beings, and she finds it hard to forgive them when they act like animals.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)