The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — The Fair Labor Standards Act Takes Effect

On this day in 1938

On October 24, 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act took effect with a 25-cent minimum wage and a 44-hour overtime threshold that fell to 40 hours by 1940.

The Off-Key Bard enters an American factory in the early 20th century. Machines rattle across the floor, workers repeat the same exhausting motions, and the hours stretch far beyond what most people today would consider a normal shift. A sixty-hour week is not unusual. Some children work alongside the adults, and wages can be so low that even steady employment offers little security.

"There must be limits to how little workers can be paid, how long they can work without additional compensation, and how young a child can be when put to work."

On October 24, 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) took effect in the United States, setting nationwide federal standards for minimum wages, overtime pay, and child labor in covered employment. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed it on June 25, and it became one of the most enduring labor reforms of the New Deal. It also helped establish the 40-hour overtime threshold that still anchors the American workweek. But contrary to a common assumption, the original law did not create a 40-hour week overnight. It began at 44 hours, and it applied to only a fraction of the workforce.

A Long Day's Work

To see why the law mattered, we have to go back to the industrial boom of the 19th century. Factories, mines, mills, and railroads pulled millions of Americans into wage work, and the hours were long. Economic historian Robert Whaples, writing for EH.net, summarizes government estimates of the average manufacturing workweek: about 69 hours in 1830, 61 in 1870, and 60 in 1890. Around 1900 it was still close to 60. Employers held great power over schedules and pay, especially in towns where a single factory provided most of the jobs.

Children worked too. The 1900 census counted 1,752,187 children under 16 in "gainful occupations," roughly one in six, up 50 percent from 1880. The National Child Labor Committee, founded in 1904, hired the photographer Lewis Hine in 1908 to document young workers in mills, factories, and other workplaces, and his pictures became the public face of the campaign against child labor.

The Eight-Hour Idea

The labor movement answered with demands for shorter hours, higher pay, and safer workplaces. The most famous slogan was the eight-hour day, which held that a worker's day should leave time for rest, family, and education as well as for the job. In October 1884, a federation of trade unions set May 1, 1886, as the date to win it, and on that day workers across the country struck and rallied. Chicago was the center, with an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 on strike. Two days later police fired on a crowd at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant and killed two people. The next night, during a rally at Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded among police officers, and the violence that followed killed seven officers and at least four civilians. A harsh crackdown on unions followed, but the eight-hour movement recovered.

Change came unevenly, and some employers moved ahead on their own. In early 1914, Ford Motor Company raised its minimum pay for male factory workers to $5 for an eight-hour day, when they had earned $2.34 for nine hours. On May 1, 1926, Ford adopted a five-day, 40-hour week in its factories, and Henry Ford argued that leisure was not "lost time." Other manufacturers soon followed. These were employer choices, though, not law. The federal government had no comprehensive system guaranteeing the same protections across the economy.

Depression, the New Deal, and the Court

The Great Depression changed the argument. As work dried up, manufacturing hours fell to about 34 a week by 1934, and the debate shifted toward wages, employment, and consumer purchasing power. Roosevelt's New Deal first tried to set labor standards through the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which authorized industry codes covering wages, maximum hours, and other practices.

One of the central figures was Frances Perkins, Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945 and the first woman in a presidential cabinet. As secretary of the New York Committee on Safety, she had assisted the state's Factory Investigating Commission after the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire of March 25, 1911, which killed 146 workers. She accepted the cabinet post on the condition that Roosevelt would back her in pursuing public old-age insurance, and she championed minimum wage legislation and the abolition of child labor. She also kept a backup plan. She said, "I've got two bills ...locked in the lower left-hand drawer of my desk against an emergency."

The emergency came on May 27, 1935. In Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act's codes of fair competition, ruling that Congress had improperly handed legislative power to the executive branch. The codes had covered wages and maximum hours. Supporters of national labor standards were left to start over.

The legal climate shifted two years later. On March 29, 1937, in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, Justice Owen Roberts joined the Court's liberal justices to uphold Washington State's minimum wage law, a decision historians often connect to the saying "a switch in time saved nine." It opened the way for a federal law written to survive judicial review.

The Fight in Congress

On May 24, 1937, Roosevelt sent Congress a message calling for "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work" and declaring that goods made under conditions that do not meet "rudimentary standards of decency" should be regarded as "contraband." The bill that followed, sponsored by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama and Representative William Connery of Massachusetts, proposed a 40-cent minimum wage and a 40-hour maximum week. It passed the Senate on July 31, 1937, by 56 to 28, then stalled in the House Rules Committee. In December 1937, the House voted 218 to 198 to send it back to committee.

Representative Mary Teresa Norton of New Jersey, chair of the House Labor Committee, led a petition to force the bill out of committee and onto the House floor. Southern members fought it. They argued that a 25-cent minimum would cost jobs in their region, and Representative John McClellan asked, "What profiteth the laborer of the South if he gain the enactment of a wage and hour law." Supporters accepted concessions: the first-year minimum was cut to 25 cents, and administrators were required to take lower living costs and higher freight rates in the South into account.

The struggle lasted more than a year. The House passed the final bill on May 24, 1938, by 314 to 97, and approved the conference report on June 13 by 291 to 89. The Senate approved it without a recorded vote. Roosevelt signed it on Saturday, June 25, among 121 bills he signed to avoid pocket vetoes nine days after Congress adjourned.

What the Law Did

The FLSA made three basic changes. First, it set a federal minimum wage for covered workers: 25 cents an hour for the first year, 30 cents for the next six years, and 40 cents after seven years. Second, it required overtime pay at one and one-half times the regular rate for hours beyond a weekly maximum. That maximum was 44 hours in the first year, 42 in the second, and 40 afterward. Third, it restricted what the statute called oppressive child labor: the employment of anyone under 16 in covered work, and the employment of 16- and 17-year-olds in occupations the chief of the Children's Bureau declared particularly hazardous. Goods made with oppressive child labor could not be shipped in interstate commerce.

The act also created a Wage and Hour Division in the Department of Labor, led by an administrator appointed by the president with the Senate's consent. The statute set the main provisions to take effect upon the expiration of 120 days from enactment, which put the start on Monday, October 24, 1938, the 121st day after the signing.

Then the schedule began to step down. On October 24, 1939, the minimum wage rose to 30 cents and the overtime threshold fell to 42 hours. On October 24, 1940, it reached 40 hours, the familiar federal baseline. The minimum wage reached 40 cents in 1945. The Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality in 1941.

What It Left Out

The FLSA was a landmark. It was not a universal guarantee. It covered only employees engaged in interstate commerce or in producing goods for commerce, and the Department of Labor's historian estimates it initially reached industries employing only about one-fifth of the labor force. The statute exempted agricultural employees outright, along with workers in executive, administrative, professional, and local retailing jobs, seamen, and fishery employees. The Economic Policy Institute adds that domestic and other service-sector workers were left out as well. Many of the excluded industries employed large numbers of Black workers, and some have argued that Roosevelt accepted the exclusions to win the support of Southern lawmakers. Later amendments extended coverage, but the uneven reach of the original law remains part of its history.

What the Law Doesn't Do

The FLSA is also easy to misunderstand. It did not make it illegal for an adult to work more than 40 hours, and the Department of Labor says there is still no limit in the act on the number of hours employees 16 and older may work in a week. Covered workers who are not specifically exempted get overtime at no less than one and one-half times their regular rate once they pass 40 hours. The law does not require extra pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, or holidays as such. It ties pay to hours worked, and weekend work counts toward the 40. The familiar Monday-through-Friday schedule came from a broader mix of labor organizing, employer decisions like Ford's, collective bargaining, and changing expectations.

Nor is 40 hours a scientific verdict on how long people should labor. It is a legal and economic threshold shaped by decades of conflict and negotiation. It tells employers when extra pay is due, and it reinforced the idea that a job should leave room for life outside it: family, education, rest, and community.

"Through factory gates and endless days,
They fought for fairer working ways.
A wage, a limit, hours defined—
And room for life beyond the grind."

The Fair Labor Standards Act did not create the labor movement, invent the eight-hour day, or hand every American worker a 40-hour week. Those changes came from generations of organizing, experiment, political conflict, and social change. But the act turned labor standards from voluntary employer practices into enforceable federal obligations, and its early gaps show how a major reform can mark real progress while leaving many workers unprotected.

On October 24, 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act took effect, setting federal minimum-wage, overtime, and child-labor standards for covered workers. Its 44-hour overtime threshold fell to 40 by 1940, helping to anchor one of the most familiar features of modern American employment.

Sources

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