FLSA Enacted: Minimum Wage and 40-Hour Week Born

President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act on June 25, 1938, but the law took effect on October 24, establishing for the first time a national minimum wage, a maximum workweek, and a federal prohibition on child labor. The act covered roughly 11 million American workers and represented the most sweeping federal intervention in workplace conditions since the Progressive Era. The FLSA set the initial minimum wage at 25 cents per hour, roughly $5.25 in today's dollars, with provisions to raise it to 40 cents over seven years. The maximum workweek was capped at 44 hours, dropping to 40 hours by 1940, with mandatory overtime pay at one and a half times the regular rate for any hours beyond the limit. Employment of children under 16 in most industries was banned outright, and children under 18 were prohibited from hazardous occupations. Roosevelt had been pushing for labor standards legislation since his first term, but Southern Democrats in Congress resisted fiercely, fearing that wage floors would disrupt the low-wage agricultural and textile economies that sustained their states. The bill passed only after extensive compromises that exempted farmworkers, domestic servants, and employees of small businesses, exclusions that disproportionately affected Black workers and would take decades to close. The Supreme Court upheld the act's constitutionality in 1941, overruling a line of earlier decisions that had struck down state minimum wage laws. The consequences reshaped American working life. Before the FLSA, twelve-hour days, six-day weeks, and child labor were common in factories, mines, and mills across the country. The act's overtime provisions created powerful economic incentives for employers to hire additional workers rather than extend existing shifts, helping to reduce the persistent unemployment of the Depression years. Every subsequent expansion of the minimum wage, every overtime dispute, and every child labor prosecution traces its legal authority to the framework established when the FLSA took effect. The 40-hour workweek that most Americans take for granted was a legislative invention, not a natural condition, and October 24, 1938, is the date it became law.