Time & Perspective Quote by Frank Murphy

Murphy’s line lands like a door being shut on an older American fantasy: that work is a “private” bargain between two equal parties, sealed off from scrutiny. He’s not just narrating a change in etiquette. He’s declaring a new jurisdiction. The bluntness of “That time has passed” carries the voice of government stepping in with authority, implying that any nostalgia for hands-off labor relations is either naive or convenient for the powerful.

The intent is strategic. By reframing employment as “public’s business,” Murphy provides moral cover for regulation: wage laws, hours limits, union protections, workplace safety. The subtext is that the so-called private contract was never truly private because its consequences spill outward - into poverty, public health, industrial stability, even democratic legitimacy. A factory town’s wages determine its hunger rates; a company’s working conditions become a hospital’s caseload. “Public” here isn’t nosy. It’s implicated.

Context matters: Murphy was a New Deal-era figure and later a Supreme Court justice in a period when the state was renegotiating capitalism’s ground rules under the pressures of the Depression and labor unrest. The quote subtly rejects the employer’s favorite rhetorical shield - “freedom of contract” - without litigating it. It works because it doesn’t argue point-by-point; it announces that the argument’s premises have expired. When the private deal produces public harm, privacy stops being a principle and starts being a cover.