Fair Labor Standards Act was established in 1938 as part of the U.S Labor Law to provide a remedy for the inequalities that existed in the bargaining power between various employers and their employees. The Act creates the right to a minimum wage; overtime payments, minimum employees required, child labor, travel time, tipped wages, sleeping time, on-call time, and suffered or permitted time among other provisions. Since its first enactment into law in 1938, the Act has undergone numerous amendments with the aim of improving the labor conditions of workers in the United States.
Senator Hugo Black first drafted the Act in 1932 in which it required employees to work for thirty hours per week, but it faced much resistance until the revision that was made 1938 that required forty hours per week were adopted. The Act stipulates the minimum wage for employees as well as the overtime payment for extra work done beyond the forty-hour limit. The current minimum wage is $7.25 and overtime of one and a half times the regular pay rate for additional hours done more than forty hours each week. The Act also makes provision for minimum payable for tipped employees, in which the current payment stands at $2.13. Besides, two classifications of employees, namely exempt and non-exempt employees that have been created by the act for the implementation of the overtime and minimum wage provisions.
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The Act has undergone various inputs and outputs through different amendments over the years that have been spearheaded by various lobby groups, workers’ unions, political parties, and even individual politicians. For Instance, in 1963, feminists agitated for “equal pay for equal work”, which led to the enactment of the Equal Pay Act. The Equal Pay Act prohibited paying female workers lower wages than their male counterparts for the same work. In 1974, the law was amended to include domestic workers who had not been covered in the previous years. More amendments were made during the former President Obama administration, such as the Minimum Wage Fairness Act in 2014; the Health Families Act in 2015; and the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act in 2016.
