Fair Labor Standards Act

Act enacted in 1938 that applies to workers involved in interstate commerce. It sets standards with respect to working conditions, including such aspects as minimum wage and working hours. It has been periodically amended and adjusted to keep the standards relevant to the current working environment.

The Fair Labor Standards Act controls the employment of children. Child labor, defined as employment of children less than eighteen years of age, has become increasingly common in American society, and it is widespread in many societies around the world. In many countries, children begin working at ages as young as three or four. Legal requirements to attend school are ignored or evaded through measures such as providing a few minutes of instruction each day in "carpet schools."

In the United States, under the Fair Labor Standards Act, children under sixteen years of age may not work during school hours, and, by law, limits are set on the number of hours of employment allowed on each school day and cumulatively for each school week. In general, employment should be in a nonhazardous, nonagriculturally related job where restrictions are in place regarding work that would be hazardous to this age group. For example, no one under eighteen is allowed to work in mining, logging, brickmaking, roofing, or excavating, or to operate power-driven machinery. In other settings, work is prohibited with equipment such as meat slicers, box crushers, and power-driven heavy equipment.

The agricultural setting does not generally come under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and there are no regulations regarding children working on family farms. Children as young as four or five have chores related to farming activity. Unfortunately, farming activity, while not regulated, is a serious source of hazard. Over one hundred American children below the age of eighteen die working on farms each year. The only restrictions for agriculture are to preclude children from applying pesticides and herbicides.

In reality, many adolescents under eighteen often work far more hours than are allowed, and some do jobs that put them at considerable risk. Some jobs appear to be relatively benign, such as packers in grocery stores, but in the fast-food business adolescents are often abused with regard to working hours (e.g., "clocking out" but continuing to work), or they are asked to handle dangerous equipment such as deep fat fryers. In most states there is a lack of supervision of children in the workplace, and accurate data collection is often not available. Studies have begun to document poor school performance due to excessive work hours.

Another aspect of poor record keeping regards filing for health claims. When a child is hurt in a workplace setting, he or she is often asked to obtain care under parental insurance, rather than applying through the worker's compensation system, which would allow for a better tracking of difficulties in the workplace.

There are seasonal variations in injuries and fatalities among working children, with more injuries occurring during the summer months when children are out of school. This especially applies to agriculturally related injuries and fatalities.

(SEE ALSO: Child Welfare; Childhood Injury; Children's Environmental Health Initiative; Farm Injuries; Occupational Disease; Occupational Safety and Health; Risk Assessment, Risk Management)

Bibliography

Pollock, S. H.; Rubenstein, H. L.; and Landrigan, P. J. (1992). "Child Labor." In Public Health and Preventive Medicine, 13th edition, eds. J. Last and R. B. Wallace. Norwalk, CT: Appleton & Lange.

— ARTHUR L. FRANK

During the Great Depression, many employees with little bargaining power were subjected to onerous conditions of employment and inadequate pay. In June 1938, Congress passed a bill designed to limit the maximum number of hours that could be required of employees and the minimum wages they could be paid. This legislation, known as the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), or the Wages and Hours Act, was the last major piece of New Deal legislation. In general, the FLSA, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, set minimum wages and maximum hours for all employees manufacturing products that were shipped in interstate commerce. It also established requirements for overtime and restricted child labor. Originally, the act's provisions extended to approximately one-fifth of the working population. Over the years, Congress amended the FLSA to add categories of employees to its coverage and to raise the level of the minimum wage. Effective 1 September 1997, the minimum wage became $5.15 an hour.

When first proposed the bill created controversy for a number of reasons. First, some legislators feared it would violate workers' "liberty of contract." From the 1890s through the 1930s, the Supreme Court carefully evaluated all wages and hours legislation to ensure that such laws did not infringe upon this constitutional guarantee. The liberty of contract doctrine held that in general the government should not be able to set the terms of contracts freely entered into by private parties. The Court allowed statutes designed to protect groups it considered either dependent or vulnerable but invalidated any other wages or hours legislation. For example, in Holden v. Hardy (1898), the Court upheld a state law limiting the working hours of miners. In Lochner v. New York (1905), however, the Court struck down similar legislation regulating bakers' hours on the grounds that bakers were not engaged in an inherently dangerous occupation.

For much of this period, the Court held that the freedom of contract granted to men by the Constitution did not apply to women or children. For example, in Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Court upheld a maximum-hours law for women. After women gained the right to vote in 1920, the Court reversed its position in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), holding that women's new political rights made them no longer a dependent class. Freedom of contract for both sexes was largely abandoned in the late 1930s, when in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) the Supreme Court dramatically altered much of its constitutional jurisprudence.

At the beginning of his administration in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wished to propose legislation to guarantee minimum wages and maximum hours and to restrict child labor, but he feared constitutional challenges. In addition, he was aware that such legislation faced opposition by conservatives in Congress. Some conservatives objected to the creation of another New Deal agency. Many southern conservatives feared that the bill's requirements of minimum wages and maximum hours and abolition of child labor would eliminate the competitive advantage that the region possessed because of its generally lower wage rates. Finally, some southern congressmen did not wish to pass legislation that required that black workers receive the same wages as white workers. When the Supreme Court signaled in the Parrish decision that wages and hours legislation was now more likely to be found constitutional, Roosevelt encouraged members of Congress to introduce the bill that became the FLSA.

Nevertheless, some concerns remained as to whether or not the proposed law lay within the scope of congressional commerce power based on Supreme Court precedent. Congress passed the FLSA pursuant to its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), the Court interpreted the commerce power of Congress broadly. As a result, in the early twentieth century, Congress began to use its commerce power to achieve certain social purposes. For example, in 1916, Congress outlawed child labor by passing the Child Labor Act, which prohibited transportation of products made with child labor in interstate commerce. The Supreme Court, however, resisted such innovative uses of the commerce power. In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the Court held the Child Labor Act unconstitutional as an interference with state regulatory power. The Hammer decision suggested that Congress lacked the power to pass legislation regulating the conditions of labor, including wages or hours. This conclusion was placed in doubt, however, by the Court's adoption in the 1930s of a more tolerant view of economic regulation. When the constitutionality of the FLSA was challenged in United States v. Darby Lumber Company (1941), the Court unanimously upheld the statute, stating that the decision in Hammer v. Dagenhart had been a departure from the Court's other holdings and should be overruled.

After Congress passed the FLSA, questions arose as to which types of work-related activities were covered by the act. One particularly difficult issue was whether or not the act should apply to the underground travel by miners to and from the "working face" of coal mines. In Jewell Ridge Coal Corporation v. Local Number 6167, United Mine Workers of America (1945), a closely divided Court held that the miners should be compensated for their travel time. In response, Congress in 1947 amended the FLSA by enacting the Portal-to-Portal Act, which overturned the Court's decision. Under the Portal-to-Portal Act only work deemed an integral and indispensable part of the employee's principal activities is entitled to compensation.

Congress also passed legislation that covers the federal government as both an employer and a purchaser of goods and services. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 requires that the federal government pay preestablished minimum wages to its employees, and the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act of 1936 requires that parties holding government contracts do the same. In 1963, Congress passed the Federal Equal Pay Act, which provides that men and women must receive equal pay for equal work in any industry engaged in interstate commerce.

Bibliography

Hall, Kermit L. The Magic Mirror: Law in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Leslie, Douglas L. Labor Law in a Nutshell. 4th ed. St. Paul, Minn.: West, 2000.

—Katherine M. Jones

Federal legislation enacted in 1938 by Congress, pursuant to its power under the Commerce Clause, that mandated a minimum wage and forty-hour work week for employees of those businesses engaged in interstate commerce.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (29 U.S.C.A. § 201 et seq.), popularly known as the "Wages and Hours Law," was one of a number of statutes making up the New Deal program of the presidential administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Aside from setting a maximum number of hours that a person could work for the minimum wage, it also established the right of the eligible worker to "time and a half" or one and one-half times the customary pay for those hours worked in excess of the statutory maximum.

Other provisions of the act forbade the use of child labor (those workers under the age of sixteen) in most jobs and prohibited the use of workers under the age of eighteen in those occupations deemed dangerous. The act was also responsible for the creation of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor.

Over the years, the Fair Labor Standards Act has been subject to amendment but it still continues to play an integral role in the workplace in the United States.

See: employment law; Labor Department.

The Fair Labor Standards Act regulates wages and hours in the workplace. Efforts to enact legislation limiting the number of hours a person could work in a week began early in the nineteenth century, but Congress was not able to adopt the Fair Labor Standards Act until 1938. Although many political and labor leaders were suspicious of federally-drawn labor standards, the minimum wage and hour laws are now widely believed to be an important piece of anti-poverty legislation.

Hugo Black's Bill

In December of, 1932, three months before Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration and at the nadir of the Great Depression, Senator Hugo L. Black of Alabama introduced a bill that would forbid interstate commerce of goods produced by persons working more than thirty hours a week or six hours a day. This early attempt to regulate the work week proved fruitless because of two Supreme Court cases that seemed to bar such laws. In the 1918 case Hammer v. Dagenhart, the Supreme Court held unconstitutional the federal child-labor law passed two years earlier. And in 1923, in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, the court voided a District of Columbia minimum wage law for women on the ground that such a law was "a naked, arbitrary exercise" of legislative power in violation of the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Black tried to distinguish his proposal from the legislation rejected in Hammer. "Laws must be interpreted to meet conditions existing when the law is interpreted," he told the Senate which passed the bill in April of 1933. The bill never passed in the House. Congress passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) in May of 1933, one section of which addressed minimum wages and maximum hours.

The Supreme Court and the New Deal

The Supreme Court in 1935 unanimously struck down the NRA, holding that it exceeded the federal government's power under the Commerce Clause and that it was an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to the executive branch. One year later the Court ruled that a New York minimum wage law was unconstitutional. Based on these decisions it appeared that the court would not sanction a bill similar to the one that Hugo Black had proposed earlier on minimum wages and maximum hours. Nevertheless, after winning the 1936 presidential election in a landslide, Roosevelt asked labor secretary Frances Perkins, "What happened to that nice unconstitutional bill you had tucked away?" He had determined that the bill should be introduced in Congress. New Deal lawyers Benjamin V. Cohen and Thomas G. Corcoran, with help from Assistant Attorney General Robert H. Jackson started revising it extensively.

In February of 1937 Roosevelt startled the nation by announcing his Reorganization of the Judiciary Proposal. The Supreme Court had invalidated six major New Deal laws over the previous two years, and Roosevelt wanted to nominate one justice, up to a total of six, for each one over the age of seventy who would not retire. This would make for a court of up to fifteen members. Roosevelt's "court-packing" proposal, as its opponents called it, produced a long and bitter political battle, but before it could come to fruition, the Supreme Court in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, upheld a Washington state minimum wage law for women and minors similar to the New York statute it had overturned. Adkins was specifically overruled as the court emphasized the need for minimum wage regulation. "The Legislature," wrote Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, "was entitled to adopt measures to reduce the evils of the 'sweating system,' the exploiting of workers at wages so low as to be insufficient to meet the bare cost of living, thus making their very helplessness the occasion of a most injurious competition." And in April, in N.L.R.B. v. Jones & Loughlin Steel Corporation, the Court upheld the National Labor Relations Act. In short, Roosevelt no longer needed to "pack the court" with justices friendly to his labor legislation because the existing court ultimately found it compatible with the Constitution.

Congress Considers a Broader Bill

The way was cleared for the introduction of a wages-hours bill. Cohen, its principal draftsman, based it on the newly reinvigorated Commerce Clause and hewed closely to the language and logic of the West Coast Hotel and Jones & Loughlin decisions. The proposal included a presidentially-appointed board with the authority to set minimum wage and maximum workweek standards. Black knew this discretion would draw strong opposition from Southern Democrats and most Republicans. The simpler the language, he told Corcoran and Cohen in their frequent meetings, the easier it would be for him, a very persuasive advocate, to get the measure passed. Black introduced the bill in the Senate on May 27, 1937, and William P. Connery of Massachusetts brought it before the House. The bill provided for a forty cents per hour minimum wage, a forty-hour maximum workweek and a minimum working age of sixteen in interstate commerce except in certain industries outside of mining and manufacturing.

The bill's scope appalled conservatives, but the most strident opposition came from Southerners who wanted to maintain the "regional pay differential" that enabled Southern employers to pay lower wages than other areas of the country.

In late July of 1937 the Senate Labor and Education Committee unanimously, including the one Republican present, approved the bill. The powers of the proposed board were sharply curbed and different fields were exempted—agriculture, fishing and forestry, cannery workers, handlers of perishable foods, intrastate retail businesses, most transportation workers, and government employees. But there were no regional differentials on wages.

Entangled in the House

The House Labor Committee passed the bill in early August, and it would have easily passed the House as a whole, but a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats stalled it in the Rules Committee. At one point not enough Democrats showed up to make a caucus official. Conservative groups teamed with Republicans and some labor leaders to try to bottle the measure—"bad medicine for us," a spokesman for the American Federation of Labor called it, even after work covered by collective bargaining was excluded.

Roosevelt called a special session of Congress in November of 1937 to force the House to consider it, and it reached the floor in December, only to see the House as a whole vote to send it back to the Rules Committee. Over-all, members of Congress had proposed seventy-two amendments to weaken the bill. In April of 1938 the House Labor Committee passed a new version, but since it lacked a wage differential, Southerners again buried the bill in the Rules Committee. It seemed unlikely that it would ever become law.

Passage

In early May of 1938 Florida's Senator Claude Pepper, basing his campaign on the wages-hours bill, decisively won the Democratic primary for re–nomination. This "put the fear of God in the hearts of some of the Democrats," one Republican congressman noted. Three days later, the rules committee sent the bill to the floor after a discharge petition gained the necessary 218 signatures in only two hours and twenty minutes as members of Congress jostled each other in a boisterous atmosphere on the floor. The House overwhelmingly passed the bill late that month, and on June 25, 1938, Roosevelt signed a compromise worked out with the Senate.

The Fair Labor Standards Act put the minimum wage at 25 cents an hour, below the rate then in effect in most union contracts, and the maximum workweek at forty-four hours for the first year of the act, forty-two for the second year, and forty hours thereafter, and it allowed seven years to reach the standards of a forty-cent minimum wage and forty-hour maximum work week. By 1943 all workers were covered by the forty-cent minimum. Advisory wage boards, under the authority of a newly established wage-hour division of the Labor Department, could consider but not be bound by "competitive conditions as affected by transportation, living, and production costs," and they have the authority to recommend higher levels. The act requires pay at the rate of time and one-half the regular rate for over forty hours worked in one week. And it forbids child labor, defined as the interstate shipment of goods made by firms that employed children under the age of sixteen, or children under eighteen in hazardous occupations. Initially, the law applied to industries whose employees combined represented about one-fifth of all workers.

The Supreme Court Upholds

The Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality in U.S. v. Darby in 1941. "The power of interstate commerce," Justice Harlan F. Stone wrote for a unanimous court, "is 'complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution.'" In 1942 in A.B. Kirschbaum v. Walling, the Supreme Court sustained the application of the act to employees who were not engaged in production for interstate commerce but operated a loft whose tenants produced garments for sale in interstate commerce. Subsequently, the court ruled that the law applied to a night watchman in a veneer plant, to window cleaners and to porters, elevator operators, and other employees of an office building, and in 1968 to nonprofessional employees of state-operated schools and hospitals.

Expanding Coverage

The original statute covered only workers "engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce." Under this language, one of two employees hired by the same firm, performing essentially the same work, might be protected while the other would not be. These anomalies were ended in 1961 by extending coverage to all those "employed by an enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce." Much litigation nevertheless continues to involve coverage issues, often focusing on the definition of "enterprise" or exemptions from coverage. Coverage of public employees has also been challenged before the Supreme Court. As of 2003, the statute protected employees of state governments, but whether they can enforce their rights depends upon whether the state has waived sovereign immunity. For private sector employees there can be enforcement by the federal Labor Department or by private rights of action. The law also regulates wages of employees who work for firms that provide goods and services to the federal government.

Over the years the Fair Labor Standards Act has been amended repeatedly. Changes have included raising the minimum wage, expanding the classes of workers covered, redefining regular-time work and raising over-time payments so as to encourage the hiring of new workers, and equalizing pay scales for men and women. Amendments have also provided more effective enforcement. Amendments in 1966 extended the Act to workers in the retail and service industry, farm workers, government and transit employees, and restaurant, hotel, and domestic workers. Some job categories had a lower minimum wage, and it was not until 1978 that all employees covered by the act earned the same rate. In 1997 a sub-minimum wage of $4.25 was established for employees under the age of twenty for their first ninety days of employment. At the same time the minimum wage was raised to $5.15. States can set a wage higher than the federal minimum, and upwards of a dozen have.

"The Most Vital Legislation"

The Fair Labor Standards Act has been called "the most vital social legislation" in American history because it affects every worker in interstate commerce. Since its principal goal was to increase the purchasing power of the lowest-paid workers, it has also been called the original anti-poverty law. Another byproduct has been to help society maintain a healthy balance between work and the rest of life. The act's impact has eroded somewhat as more Americans have moved into professional and other employment categories, such as executive and administrative, that are exempt from wage regulations. It does not cover approximately 50 million of the current 150 million workers. In 2003 strong union opposition in the House of Representatives doomed the passage of the Family Time Flexibility Act, which would have allowed employees the option of receiving overtime pay in the form of time off. This typifies continual attempts to change aspects of the law, but the Fair Labor Standards Act remains a major part of the American economic landscape.

Bibliography

Grossman, Jonathan, "Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage." Monthly Labor Review (June 1978).

Lash, Joseph P. Dealers and Dreamers: A New Look at the New Deal. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Lasser, William. Benjamin V. Cohen: Architect of the New Deal. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Newman, Roger K. Hugo Black: A Biography. New York: Pantheon, 1994.

Samuel, Howard D. "Troubled Passage: The Labor Movement and the Fair Labor Standards Act." Monthly Labor Review (December 2000).

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (Pub.L. 75-718) (FLSA, ch. 676, 52 Stat. 1060, June 25, 1938, 29 U.S.C. ch.8), also called the Wages and Hours Bill, ^[1] is United States federal law that applies to employees engaged in interstate commerce or employed by an enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce^[2], unless the employer can claim an exemption from coverage. The FLSA established a national minimum wage,^[3] guaranteed time and a half for overtime in certain jobs,^[4] and prohibited most employment of minors in "oppressive child labor," a term defined in the statute.^[5]

Contents 1 Amendments 2 Practical application 3 See also 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Amendments

History of the federal minimum wage in real and nominal dollars.

Many amendments have been thought of in the form of bills and petitions such as this one. The 1947 Portal-to-Portal Act specified exactly what type of time was considered compensable work time. In general, as long as an employee is engaging in activities that benefit the employer, regardless of when they're performed, the employer has an obligation to pay the employee for his or her time. It also specified however that travel to and from the work place was a normal incident of employment and shouldn't be considered paid working time.

The full effect of the FLSA of 1938 was postponed by the wartime inflation of the 1940s, which lowered wage values to below the level specified in the Act. The October 26, 1949 Fair Labor Standards Amendment (ch. 736, Pub.L. 81-393, 63 Stat. 910, 29 U.S.C. § 201) included changes to overtime compensation, defined "regular rate", redefined "produced", raised the minimum wage from 40 cents to 75 cents per hour and extended child labor coverage. It also included a few new exemptions for special worker classes.

In 1955 the FLSA was amended once again to increase minimum wage, this time to one dollar per hour.

The 1961 FLSA Amendment added another method of determining coverage called enterprise coverage. Enterprise coverage applies only when the business is involved in interstate commerce and its gross annual business volume is a minimum of $500,000. All employees working for these “enterprises” are then covered by the FLSA so long as the individual firms of the "enterprise have a revenue greater than $500,000 per year^[6]. Under the original 1938 act, a worker whose work is in the channels of interstate commerce is covered as an individual. "Interstate commerce" is interpreted so broadly that practically anything fits, such as ordering, loading, or using supplies from out of state, accepting payments from customers based on credit cards issued by out-of-state banks, and so on.

The 1961 Amendment also specified that coverage is automatic for schools, hospitals, nursing homes, or other residential care facilities. Coverage is also automatic for all governmental entities at whatever level of government, no matter how big or small. Coverage does not apply to certain entities that are not organized for a business purpose, such as churches and charitable institutions. Minimum wage was again increased to $1.25 per hour. What could be considered a wage was specifically defined and entitlement to sue for back wages was granted.

The Contract Work Hours Standards Act, though not a direct amendment or modification to the FLSA, became law in 1962. It replaced with a single, comprehensive law the confusing and often ambiguous series of “Eight Hour Laws” dating back to 1892 that formerly governed hours of work for laborers.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was passed which amended the FLSA to make it illegal to pay workers lower wages strictly on the basis on their sex. It is often summed up with the phrase “Equal pay for equal work”. This was a major step towards closing the wage gap in women’s pay. In the past it had been generally accepted that women did not deserve to earn as much money as men because they were not heads of households. However, in many homes they were in fact the sole breadwinner, for various reasons, ranging from death or disability of a spouse to divorce or single parenthood. Regardless of roles in the family the Equal Pay Act established a single standard to apply to both sexes. The Equal Pay Act allows for unequal pay for equal work only when wages are set pursuant to a seniority system, a merit system, a system which measures earnings by quantity or quality of production, or other factors outside of sex.

The 1966 FLSA Amendment expanded coverage to some farm workers and increased the minimum wage to $1.60 in stages. This was in large part due to the efforts of labor leaders like Cesar Chavez who brought farm worker rights to national attention during this period. The 1966 FLSA amendment also gave state and local government employees coverage for the first time.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) of 1967 prohibited employment discrimination against persons 40 years of age or older. Some older workers were being denied health benefits based on their age and denied training opportunities prior to the passage of the ADEA. This Act applies only to businesses employing more than twenty workers.

The 1974 FLSA Amendment expanded coverage to include other state and local government employees that were not previously covered. Domestic workers also became covered and the minimum wage was increased to $2.30 in stages.

The 1977 FLSA Amendment increased the minimum wage in yearly increments through 1981 to $3.35 an hour. Changes were made involving tipped employees and tip credit. Partial over time exemption was repealed in stages for certain hotel, motel and restaurant employees.

The Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (MSPA), passed in 1983, was designed to provide migrant and seasonal farm workers with protections concerning pay, working conditions, and work-related conditions, to require farm labor contractors to register with the U.S. Department of Labor, and to assure necessary protections for farm workers, agricultural associations, and agricultural employers.

The Amendment to the FLSA enacted in 1985 permitted state and local government employers to compensate their employee’s overtime hours with paid time away from work (compensatory time or “comp time”) in lieu of overtime pay. It also included modifications to ensure that true volunteer activities were not impeded or discouraged.

The Department of Defense Authorization Act of 1986 repealed the eight-hour daily overtime requirements on all federal contracts.

The 1989 FLSA Amendments increased the minimum wage to $4.25 in stages. The distinction between retail and non-retail was eliminated. Construction and laundry or dry cleaning were no longer named as enterprises. Changes were again made to the tip credit system. A “training wage” was established at 85% of minimum wage for workers less than 20 years of age. This “training wage” could be paid for up to 90 days under certain conditions.

The 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act provided eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave for certain family and medical reasons. This was partly inspired by similar policies already in effect throughout most of Western Europe. The passage of this act was the fulfillment of a campaign promise made by Bill Clinton during the presidential campaign of 1992 and one of the first major bills passed during his term.

The 1996 FLSA Amendment increased the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour. However, the Small Business Job Protection Act (PL 104-188), which provided the minimum-wage increase, also detached tipped employees from future minimum-wage increases ^[7]. Prior to 1996, tipped employees received 50% of the prevailing minimum wage. The tipped employee minimum wage was frozen, under federal law at least, at $2.13 per hour(29 U.S.C. § 203). State laws that grant higher hourly wages remain in force.

On August 23, 2004, controversial changes to the FLSA's overtime regulations went into effect, making substantial modifications to the definition of an "exempt" employee. Low-level working supervisors throughout American industry were reclassified as “executives” and lost overtime rights. These changes were sought by business interests and the Bush administration, which claimed that the laws needed clarification and that few workers would be affected. The Bush administration called the new regulations "FairPay." But other organizations, such as the AFL-CIO, claimed the changes would make millions of additional workers ineligible to obtain relief under the FLSA for overtime pay. Attempts in Congress to overturn the new regulations were unsuccessful.

Conversely, some low-level employees (particularly administrative-support staff) that had previously been classified as exempt were now reclassified as non-exempt. Although such employees work in positions bearing titles previously used to determine exempt status (such as "executive assistant"), the 2004 amendment to the FLSA now requires that an exemption must be predicated upon actual job function and not job title. Those employees with job titles that previously allowed exemption whose job descriptions did not include managerial functions were now reclassified from exempt to non-exempt.

On May 25, 2007, President Bush signed into law a supplemental appropriation bill (H.R. 2206) which contains the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007. This provision amended the FLSA to provide for the increase of the federal minimum wage by an incremental plan, culminating in a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour by the summer of 2009.

Practical application

Today, in an age of global economic change and dramatic alteration of the American work force, the Fair Labor Standards Act still stands as the preeminent tool for enforcing and protecting the rights and wages of non-exempt employees.

The Fair Labor Standards Act applies to "employees who are engaged in interstate commerce or in the production of goods for commerce, or who are employed by an enterprise engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce",^[2] unless the employer can claim an exemption from coverage. Generally, an employer who does at least $500,000 of business or gross sales in a year satisfies the commerce requirements of the FLSA, and therefore that employer's workers will be subject to the FLSA's protections if none of the other exemptions apply. Several exemptions exist that relieve an employer from having to meet the statutory minimum wage, overtime, and record-keeping requirements. The largest exceptions apply to the so-called "white collar" exemptions applicable to professional, administrative and executive employees. Exemptions are narrowly construed; an employer must prove that the employees fit "plainly and unmistakenly" within the exemption's terms.

The FLSA applies to "any individual employed by an employer" but not to independent contractors or volunteers because they are not considered "employees" under the FLSA.^[8] Still, an employer cannot simply exempt workers from the FLSA by calling them independent contractors, and many employers have illegally misclassified their workers as independent contractors. Some employers similarly mislabel employees as volunteers. Courts will look at the "economic reality" of the relationship between the putative employer and the worker to determine whether the worker is, in fact, an independent contractor. Courts use a similar test to determine whether a worker was concurrently employed by more than one person or entity; commonly referred to as "joint employers." For example, a farm worker may be considered jointly employed by a labor contractor who is in charge of recruitment, transportation, payroll, and keeping track of hours, and a grower who generally monitors the quality of the work performed, determines where to place workers, controls the volume of work available, has quality control requirements, and has the power to fire, discipline, or provide work instructions to workers.

Presuming an employee is not exempt from overtime, there are many instances in which overtime is not paid properly, including when an employee is not paid for travel time between job sites, activities before their shift starts or after it ends, and activities to prepare for work that are central to work activities.

If an employee is entitled to overtime they must be paid one and a half times the employee's "regular rate of pay" for all hours worked over 40 in the same work week.

See also

• Timeline of children's rights in the United States
• Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co.
• Frank Murphy
• Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority
• Labor market
• Positive rights
• Wages
  • Living wage
  • Minimum Wage in the United States
    • List of U.S. minimum wages
  • Maximum wage
  • Wage slave
  • White-collar exemption

References

1. ^ "Wages and Hours", Time magazine. Dec. 13, 1937. Retrieved 7/5/08.
2. ^ ^{a b} Fair Labor Standards Act - FLSA - 29 U.S. Code Chapter 8 | finduslaw
3. ^ See 29 U.S.C. § 206.
4. ^ See 29 U.S.C. § 207.
5. ^ See 29 U.S.C. § 203(l) and 29 U.S.C. § 212.
6. ^ http://www.dol.gov/esa/minwage/coverage.htm
7. ^ http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/29C8.txt
8. ^ Fair Labor Standards Act - FLSA - 29 U.S. Code Chapter 8 | finduslaw

Further reading

• Burkhauser, Richard V.; Finegan, T. Aldrich (1989). "The Minimum Wage and the Poor: The End of a Relationship". Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 8 (1): 53–71. doi:10.2307/3324424. 
• Grossman, J. (1978). "Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage". Monthly Labor Review 101 (6): 22–30. PMID 10307721. 
• Lechner, Jay P. (2005). "The New FLSA White-Collar Regulations—Analysis of Changes". Florida Bar Journal 79 (2): 20. http://www3.flabar.org/DIVCOM/JN/JNJournal01.nsf/76d28aa8f2ee03e185256aa9005d8d9a/b13d230575e0ef2e85256f96006fa66e?OpenDocument. 
• Mettler, Suzanne B. (1994). "Federalism, Gender, & the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938". Polity 26 (4): 635–654. doi:10.2307/3235098. 

External links

• U.S. Department of Labor page on the FLSA
• Purchasing power of minimum wage from 1958 to 2002, via fiscalpolicy.org
• AFL-CIO, American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial Organizations
  • Minimum wage, via aflcio.org
  • State minimum wages, via aflcio.org
  • 2004 changes in overtime regulations, via aflcio.org
• Average U.S. farm and non-farm wages compared to the minimum wage (1981 - 2004), via usda.gov
• Impact of Proposed Minimum-Wage Increase on Low-income Families, via cepr.net (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
• Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now
• Center for Policy Alternatives, via stateaction.org
• The Economic Policy Institute (epinet.org)
  • Analysis of 2004 change in overtime regulations, via epinet.org
• Floridians for All
• Raising the National Minimum Wage: Information, Opinion, Research
• Workplace Fairness
  • Minimum wage, via workplacefairness.org
  • Overtime compensation, via workplacefairness.org
• Business & Legal Reports
  • Study Finds Many Day Laborers Exploited
  • Supreme Court Clarifies Wage and Hour Law
• Exempt and Non-Exempt Employees Definition
• Fair Labor Standards Act - FLSA - 29 U.S. Code Chapter 8

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