The Fair Labor Standards Act

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 wrote some of the most basic features of modern American work into law. It established a federal minimum wage, mandated extra pay for overtime beyond a standard workweek, and finally banned most child labor — reforms that organizers like Mother Jones had demanded for half a century.

It was the last major piece of New Deal legislation, and a hard-won one. Earlier attempts at federal wage-and-hour and child-labor laws had been struck down by the Supreme Court, and the FLSA passed only after the Court's resistance to New Deal measures finally broke.

The law set the standard forty-hour week as the baseline of American working life and made the minimum wage a permanent fixture of national politics, debated and raised in the decades since. For millions of workers it meant the difference between exhaustion and a livable schedule.

Together with the Wagner Act, the FLSA defined the New Deal's settlement with American labor — one law securing the right to organize, the other setting a floor beneath every worker whether organized or not. Both remain central to how Americans work today.