The Fair Labor Standards Act: A Living Document

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12103
• Author: Thomas E. Perez
• Date: 01 October 2015
• Published date: 01 October 2015

The Fair Labor Standards Act: A Living

Document

*

THOMAS E. PEREZ

Amid the devastation and chaos of the Great Depression, with brutal income

inequality tearing at the nation’s fabric, President Roosevelt and Labor Secre-

tary Frances Perkins mustered the political will to enact the Fair Labor Stan-

dards Act (FLSA) in June of 1938.

The FLSA established the first federal minimum wage, the standard work-

week, overtime rules, and it made most forms of child labor illegal. The law,

in its own words, was designed to eliminate “labor conditions detrimental to

the maintenance of the minimum standards of living necessary for health, effi-

ciency, and well-being of workers.”

1

It has been and remains the nation’s

worker protection bulwark, eliminating abuse and exploitation, ensuring the

dignity of work, and helping millions upon millions of people punch their

ticket to the middle class.

None of which is to say it was easy. The political resistance was strong, as

was the hyperbolic pushback from business interests who insisted that the bill

would end free enterprise as we know it. But President Roosevelt and Secretary

Perkins were resolute in the face of this “calamity-howling,”as FDR called it.

They remained focused on the common good, refusing to turn their backs on

intense human suffering during the worst economic crisis in the nation’s history.

They were determined to pass legislation that, in Roosevelt’s words, would “end

starvation wages and intolerable hours.”

2

And they delivered—providing genera-

tions of Americans with a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

The FLSA has truly been a living document, changing to meet the evolving

needs of the nation’s workers. Over more than three-quarters of a century, the

Act has been amended twenty times, adding more protections for workers,

raising the minimum wage twenty-two times, reducing the standard work week

*The author’saffiliation is Secretary of Labor, U.S. Department of Labor, Washington, DC.

1

Title 29, Chapter 8, U.S. Code §202 (a) - Congressional finding and declaration of policy.

2

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress on January 3, 1938.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 54, No. 4 (October 2015). Published 2015. This article is a U.S. Government

work and is in the public domain in the USA.

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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