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Please be aware that during periods of heavy use you may encounter delays in accessing the catalog. For assistance in locating other subject headings that may relate to this subject, please consult a reference librarian. Search this Guide Search. This Month in Business History. Last signature necessary to bring wages-hours bill to floor of house. Joseph J. Mansfield, of Texas, affixing his signature.
Standing left to right: Rep. Mary T. Pat Boland, House Whip. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. To administer the wage and overtime components of the law, a Wage and Hour Division was created within the Department of Labor and included this finding and declaration of policy in the law itself : SEC.
Print Resources The following titles link to fuller bibliographic information in the Library of Congress Online Catalog. Paulsen Call Number: HD P This is the history of President Franklin D. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organization CIO , on one of the rare occasions when they agreed, both favored a bill which would limit labor standards to low-paid and essentially unorganized workers.
Based on some past experiences, many union leaders feared that a minimum wage might become a maximum and that wage boards would intervene in areas which they wanted reserved for labor-management negotiations. They were satisfied when the bill was amended to exclude work covered by collective bargaining. The weakened bill passed the Senate July 31, , by a vote of 56 to 28 and would have easily passed the House if it had been put to a vote.
But a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats bottled it up in the House Rules Committee. After a long hot summer, Congress adjourned without House action on fair labor standards. An angry President Roosevelt decided to press again for passage of the Black-Connery bill. Having lost popularity and split the Democratic Party in his battle to "pack" the Supreme Court, Roosevelt felt that attacking abuses of child labor and sweatshop wages and hours was a popular cause that might reunite the party.
A wage-hour, child-labor law promised to be a happy marriage of high idealism and practical politics. On October 12, , Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to convene on November The public interest, he said, required immediate Congressional action: "The exploitation of child labor and the undercutting of wages and the stretching of the hours of the poorest paid workers in periods of business recession has a serious effect on buying power".
Despite White House and business pressure, the conservative alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats that controlled the House Rules Committee refused to discharge the bill as it stood.
Therefore, Norton told the House of Representatives that the Labor Committee would offer an amendment to change the administration of the bill from a five-man board to an administrator under the Department of Labor. Urging representatives to sign a petition to jar the bill out of committee, Norton appealed:. I now hope and urge that these Members will keep faith with me, as I have kept faith with them, and sign the petition.
I do not see how any Member of this House can enjoy his Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow if he fails to put his name to that petition this afternoon. Though Norton missed her Thanksgiving Day dead-line, by December 2, the bill's supporters had rounded up enough signers to give the petition the signatures necessary to bring the bill to a vote on the House floor. The AFL accused the Roosevelt Administration of favoring industrial over craft unions and opposed wage-board determination of labor standards for specific industries.
Accordingly, the AFL fought for a substitute bill with a flat cent-an-hour minimum wage and a maximum hour week. In the ensuing confusion, shortly, before the Christmas holiday of , the House by a vote of to unexpectedly sent the bill back to the Labor Committee.
This was the first time that a major administration bill had been defeated on the floor of the House. The press took the view that this was the death knell of wage-hour legislation as well as a decisive blow to the President's prestige. Again, Roosevelt returned to the fray. In his annual message to Congress on January 3, , he said he was seeking "legislation to end starvation wages and intolerable hours.
The day following Roosevelt's message, Representative Lister Hill, a strong Roosevelt supporter, won an Alabama election primary for the Senate by an almost 2-to-1 majority over an anti-New Deal congressman. The victory was significant because much of the opposition to wage-hour laws came from Southern congressmen. In February, a national public opinion poll showed that 67 percent of the populace favored the wage-hour law, with even the South showing a substantial plurality of support for higher standards.
Reworking the bill. In the meantime, Department of Labor lawyers worked on a new bill. Privately, Roosevelt had told Perkins that the length and complexity of the bill caused some of its difficulties.
Lawyers trying to simplify the bill faced the problem that, although legal language makes legislation difficult to understand, bills written in simple English are often difficult for the courts to enforce. And because the wage-hour, child-labor bill had been drafted with the Supreme Court in mind, Solicitor Labor Gerard Reilly could not meet the President's two-page goal; however, he succeeded in cutting the bill from 40 to 10 pages.
He approved it, and the new bill went to Congress. Roosevelt and Perkins prepared for rugged opposition. Roosevelt put pressure on Congressmen who had ridden his coattails to election victory in and who then knifed New Deal legislation.
Perkins added to her staff Rufus Pole, a young lawyer, to follow the bill through Congress. Pole worked resourcefully pinpointed the issues that bothered some Congressmen, and identified a large number of Senators and Representatives who could be counted on to vote favorably.
Norton appointed Representative Robert Ramspeck of Georgia to head a subcommittee to bridge the gap between various proposals. The subcommittee's efforts resulted in the Ramspeck compromise which Perkins felt "contained the bare essentials she could support.
It did not provide for an administrator as had the previous bill which had been voted back to the committee by the House. Instead, the compromise allowed for a five-member wage board which would be less powerful than those proposed by the Black-Connery bill. The House Labor Committee voted down the Ramspeck compromise, but, by a to-4 vote, approved an even more "barebones" bill presented by Norton. Her bill following the AFL proposal, provided for a cent hourly minimum wage, replaced the wage boards proposed by the Ramspeck compromise with an administrator and advising commission, and allowed for procedures for investigation into certain cases.
A message from the voters. Again, the House Rules Committee under Rep. John J. O'Conner of New York, whom Roosevelt called an "obstructionist" who "pickled" New Deal programs prevented discussion of the bill on the House floor by a vote of 8 to 6. On April 30, , for the sixth time since taking office, he communicated with Congress over wages and hours through a letter to Mrs. He said he had no right whatsoever as President to criticize the rules but suggested as an ex-legislator and as a friend that "the whole membership of the legislative body should be given full and free opportunity to discuss [exceptional measures] which are of undoubted national importance because they relate to major policies of Government and affect the lives of millions of people.
I hope that the democratic processes of legislation will continue. Mark Wilcox in the Florida Senate primary. Wilcox had made New Deal programs the major issue and had labeled Pepper "Roosevelt rubber stamp. Nothing impresses Congressmen more than election returns. The January and May victories of New Deal advocated in the South brought home to Southern Congressmen the message of how their constituents felt about fair labor standards.
A petition to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee was placed on the desk of the Speaker of the House on May 6, at 12 noon. He won in a landslide. Frances Perkins , the Secretary of Labor and first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet, led this effort. And, in the face of growing concern about economic inequality, FLSA provisions remain newsworthy. For example, the fight for a higher minimum wage has proven quite successful in cities from Seattle to Birmingham voting to hike their minimum wages.
Last month, the Obama Administration announced a new rule that will increase the number of workers eligible for overtime by about 4,, The current push across the nation to drastically raise the minimum wage suggests a widespread belief in the efficacy of such laws.
The act also banned businesses from employing workers younger than 14—with some exceptions for agricultural and family businesses—and limited the types of jobs children under age 18 could perform. At the time the FLSA was enacted, it was a radical change for the government to set standards for private industry, said Richard Fiesta, executive director of the Alliance for Retired Americans in Washington, D.
In recent years, however, many state and local laws have become more generous than federal law. Employers need to understand—and comply with—all of the wage and hour laws that affect their workplace. While lawsuits and regulatory actions over the FLSA are common today, that hasn't always been the case. HR departments should adopt technology to aid in their wage and hour compliance efforts, noted LaToi Mayo, an attorney with Littler in Lexington, Ky.
Compliance tools can help with payroll audits and determine employee classifications. Today, employees often can perform work wherever and whenever they have an Internet or mobile phone connection, Pockrass said.
In addition, job duties often change over time, so employers need to be vigilant in determining whether such changes have an impact on a position's exemption status, he added. Predicting the future activities of Congress is difficult in and of itself, so trying to predict what new laws Congress may pass to change the FLSA is even more challenging, Pockrass said.
There are efforts underway to amend the FLSA to recognize an "independent employee" or "intermediary employee. Technology will continue to change how work is done, but the reality is that most people still are in conventional work arrangements, said Christine Owens at the symposium.
NELP is concerned about creating an intermediary standard between employee and independent contractor because employers may misclassify workers who are actually employees and should have the associated employment protections, she said. NELP does support sector-based standards, however, for industries in which there are many independent contractors or where there may be high rates of misclassification, such as in the ride-share industry.
Another likely change on the horizon is an increase to the FLSA's salary threshold for white-collar exemptions. The Society for Human Resource Management SHRM supports an update of the salary level but one that follows previous methodology to achieve a more equitable increase.
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