(a) The Legislature has long recognized, through laws regulating the employment of men, women and children, that working conditions detrimental to health and welfare result in injury not only to the workers immediately affected but to the public interest as a whole. Now the Legislature finds that industrial home work runs counter to, and tends to defeat, the purpose of these laws because it is performed at excessively low wages for long and irregular hours, under insanitary and otherwise unhealthful working conditions, in constant competition with factory production and free from effective regulation; that these factors result in (1) serious danger to the health, efficiency and general well-being of home workers, (2) the breakdown of standards of employment for factory workers in this State, (3) rendering more difficult the enforcement of laws governing the standards of employment for such factory workers, (4) unfair competition between employers in factory production and employers utilizing industrial home work, and (5) detriment to the consumer and the public welfare.

(b) It is hereby declared to be the policy of this act, through the exercise by the Legislature of the police power, to control strictly the methods of production by industrial home work in this State.

L.1941, c. 308, p. 828, s. 1.