Minimum Wage & Minors history

By 1910, two million children worked up to 20 hours a day in this country.

The immediate cause of the strike was a reduction in earnings, growing out of the State law which became effective January 1, 1912, and which reduced the hours of employment for women and for children under 18 years of age from 56 to 54 hours per week.

1676, 63rd Cong., 3rd Sess., at 5 (1915), reprinted in Serial Set Volume No.

229 (1917), in Labor Laws of the United States Series: No.

The court’s ruling de-emphasized the freedom of contract, reversing its 1923 decision and opening the door for future minimum wage legislation.

In this rapidly shifting political and economic climate Franklin D. Roosevelt won the 1932 elections and appointed Frances Perkins as his Secretary of Labor.

In Schechter Poultry Corp. v United States (1935), however, the Supreme Court struck down the law, drawing the ire of Roosevelt and forcing Perkins to find a new way to pass labor reform.

Since 1938, the minimum wage has been raised more than twenty times, in administrations of both parties.

Consequently on June 26, 1940, an amendment was enacted prescribing the establishment of special industry committees to determine, and issue through wage orders, the minimum wage levels applicable in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

By 1943, the Labor Department had raised the federal minimum wage to 40 cents an hour.

The new law also created a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, set to increase by 5 cents a year to reach 40 cents an hour by 1945.

On May 14, 1947, the FLSA was amended by the Portal-to-Portal Act.

In 1949, the minimum wage was raised from 40 cents an hour to 75 cents an hour for all workers and minimum wage coverage was expanded to include workers in the air transport industry.

In 1961, the 1961 FLSA Amendments would be passed.

The 1977 amendments, by eliminating the separate lower minimum for large agricultural employers (although retaining the overtime exemption), set a new uniform wage schedule for all covered workers.

To allow for the effects of inflation, the $250,000 dollar volume of sales coverage test for retail trade and service enterprises was increased in stages to $362,500 after December 31, 1981.

Adapted from Minimum Wage and Maximum Hours Standards Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1988 Report to the Congress under Section 4(d)(1) of the FLSA.

The 1989 amendments established a single annual dollar volume test of $500,000 for enterprise coverage of both retail and no retail businesses.

The amendments also established a training wage provision (at 85% of the minimum wage, but not less than $3.35 an hour) for employees under the age of twenty, a provision that expired in 1993.

The annual report Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers provides national-level statistics starting in 2002 on hourly-paid workers with earnings at or below the prevailing Federal minimum wage.

In the most recent revision to the Fair Labor Standards Act in 2009, the federal minimum wage was increased to $7.25 an hour.

What does the Fair Labor Standards Act Require?Accessed 7/10/2014.

Right now, there is a bill in the House that would gradually raise the federal minimum wage to $10.00 an hour by January 1, 2015.

SNAP Income Limits 2017.