On February 12^th in 1938, The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was introduced in the House of Representatives. It was fully enacted by congress on February 25^th.

Instituted under F.D.R.’s New Deal, the Fair Labor Standards Act created federal wage and hour laws that established a standard forty-hour workweek, minimum wage and overtime pay (1.5 times the regular rate for all hours worked over forty hours), mandated employer wage and time recordkeeping, and introduced child labor standards. It also created exemptions to those rules for certain types of workers, and a new division in the Department of Labor, the Wage and Hour Division, tasked with enforcing the new laws.

F.D.R. said, in a speech the year before the act was signed into law, “Our nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work. A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.”

The adoption of the FLSA was a landmark event for the struggle against exploitative labor, and for helping workers to create a fairer and more equitable labor market.

Workers today can honor the legacy of the FLSA by staying informed—know your rights, share them, and speak up when they’re violated. If you have questions about minimum wage, overtime, misclassification, or unpaid wages, reach out to us for a confidential consultation.

Written by James Sherwood