Twenty-Five Cents an Hour: How the Fair Labor Standards Act Passed

On a Saturday afternoon in March 1911, a young social worker named Frances Perkins was having tea with friends near Washington Square in Manhattan when she heard fire engines. She ran toward the noise and arrived in time to watch workers at the Triangle Waist Company jump from the upper floors of the Asch Building because the doors had been locked and the fire escape had collapsed. One hundred forty-six people died, most of them young immigrant women. Perkins spent the rest of her life saying, in one form or another, that this was the day the New Deal began. Twenty-seven years later, as the first woman ever to serve in a president's cabinet, she watched Franklin Roosevelt sign the law that put a floor under American wages and a ceiling on American hours. Getting there took a constitutional crisis, a stubborn committee, a primary election in Florida and a bargain that left out millions of the workers who most needed it.

In short: The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed on June 25, 1938, set the first federal minimum wage at 25 cents an hour, put the country on a path to the 40-hour week and banned most child labor. Frances Perkins had pushed for those goals since she joined the cabinet. To pass it, Roosevelt's allies accepted exclusions, above all for farm and domestic workers, that fell hardest on Black workers in the South, and some of those gaps are still open.

The list she brought to the job

When Roosevelt asked Perkins to be his Secretary of Labor in early 1933, she did not simply say yes. She told him what she would want to do, and she had a list. Among the items were unemployment insurance, old-age insurance, a federal minimum wage, a limit on working hours and the abolition of child labor. Roosevelt agreed she could try. She later wrote about the conversation in her memoir of their years together, and historians have treated the list as a rough map of the New Deal's labour agenda.

Perkins was not a radical by the standards of her day. She came out of the world of settlement houses and consumer leagues, women's organizations that had spent decades lobbying state legislatures for safety codes and hours limits. The Triangle fire had pushed New York to pass a wave of factory reforms, and she had helped write and enforce them. What she wanted in Washington was to take what had worked in the better states and make it national.

The trouble was that the Supreme Court had spent decades saying the national government could not do it.

A Court that kept saying no

In 1918, in Hammer v. Dagenhart, the Court struck down a federal law that tried to keep goods made by child labour out of interstate commerce. In 1923, in Adkins v. Children's Hospital, it struck down a minimum wage for women in the District of Columbia, reasoning that it interfered with freedom of contract. In 1935 it threw out the National Industrial Recovery Act, whose industry codes had included wage and hour rules. And in June 1936, in a case from New York called Morehead v. Tipaldo, a five-justice majority struck down a state minimum wage for women as well.

That last decision was a political gift to Roosevelt, who carried 46 of 48 states that November. It also made the Court's position hard to defend. If neither the states nor the federal government could set a minimum wage, then nobody could. Even many Republicans found that conclusion uncomfortable.

The opening came in March 1937. In West Coast Hotel v. Parrish, a case brought by a hotel chambermaid in Washington state named Elsie Parrish, the Court upheld a state minimum wage law and overruled Adkins. Justice Owen Roberts had joined the majority that struck down New York's law the year before, and now he joined the majority that upheld Washington's. The switch came in the middle of the fight over Roosevelt's plan to add justices to the Court, though historians still argue over whether the timing was cause or coincidence. Either way, the constitutional wall had a door in it, and the administration moved to walk through.

The bill that would not move

In May 1937, Roosevelt sent Congress a message asking for a wage-and-hour law. He argued that a democracy that could support itself had no excuse for child labour or for pushing wages down and hours up. The bill that followed carried the names of Senator Hugo Black of Alabama and Representative William Connery of Massachusetts. Black had already pushed a 30-hour workweek bill through the Senate in 1933, which had died in the House; he knew what he was up against.

The Senate passed the new bill in the summer of 1937. In the House, it went to the Rules Committee and stopped. The committee was controlled by a coalition of conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans who agreed on very little except that this bill should not reach the floor. Southern members saw the minimum wage as a threat to their region's main economic advantage, which was cheap labour, much of it Black. Many business groups in the North opposed it as government meddling in private contracts. Some leaders of the American Federation of Labor were wary too, worried that a legal minimum could become a legal maximum and that government wage boards might weaken collective bargaining.

Supporters tried a discharge petition, a rarely successful procedure that lets a majority of the House pull a bill out of committee. They got the signatures in late 1937, and the bill reached the floor, but the House voted to send it back to committee. It looked dead.

Florida changes the math

It was revived by an election. In the spring of 1938, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida faced a Democratic primary in which he openly campaigned for the wage-and-hour bill. Lister Hill, running for the Senate in Alabama, took a similar stance. Both won. Southern members of the House who had assumed that their voters opposed a minimum wage suddenly had evidence that a good number of them did not. Working people in the South, white and Black, were among the lowest paid in the country, and a federal floor looked to many of them less like an attack on their region than a raise.

Representative Mary Norton of New Jersey, who chaired the House Labor Committee after Connery's death, filed a new discharge petition. This time it filled quickly. The House passed a version of the bill, the conference committee merged it with the Senate's, and both chambers approved the final text in June. Roosevelt signed it on June 25, 1938. In a radio address around then, he spoke of it as among the most important laws for workers ever passed, and Perkins regarded it as one of her proudest achievements.

What the law did

The Fair Labor Standards Act set a minimum wage of 25 cents an hour, due to rise to 30 cents after a year and to 40 cents within several years, with industry committees setting the pace. It set a maximum workweek of 44 hours, stepping down to 40 hours by 1940, and required time-and-a-half pay for hours beyond that. It banned most work by children under 16 and hazardous work by those under 18. It took effect in October 1938.

Those numbers look tiny now, and they were modest even then. A quarter an hour was below what most Northern factory workers already earned. The people it actually raised were concentrated in low-wage industries, especially textiles, lumber and other Southern manufacturing, where many workers had been earning less. The hours rule mattered just as much. The 40-hour week, which unions had fought for since the nineteenth century, became the legal standard for covered work, and overtime pay gave employers a reason to hire more people instead of working the same people longer.

In 1941, in United States v. Darby, a unanimous Supreme Court upheld the law and expressly overruled Hammer v. Dagenhart. The federal government's power to set labour standards for goods in interstate commerce was settled, and it has stayed settled.

The workers left out on purpose

Now the part that the commemorations tend to skip. To get the votes it needed, the law excluded whole categories of work. Agricultural workers were out. Domestic workers, the people who cooked, cleaned and cared for children in other people's homes, were out. The law also reached only businesses engaged in interstate commerce, which left much retail and service work uncovered at first.

Who did those jobs in 1938? In the South, a very large share of Black workers were farm labourers, sharecroppers or domestic servants. The exclusions meant that the law's protections arrived for white factory hands in Southern mill towns while skipping most Black workers in the same counties. Historians such as Ira Katznelson have argued that this was the price Southern Democrats demanded for their votes, and that it fit a pattern across New Deal laws that were written to protect the region's racial order.

Some scholars push back on part of that account. They point out that farm and domestic work was hard to regulate with the administrative tools of the 1930s, that similar exclusions appeared in labour laws in other countries and in Northern state laws, and that some exclusions had support from people outside the South. That case deserves to be heard; administration really was hard. But the two explanations are not exclusive. Even if the reasons were mixed, the effect was not. The law drew its boundary in a place that kept most Black workers outside it, and powerful members of Congress knew exactly who was on each side of the line.

How the gaps were closed, and which ones were not

Over the following decades, Congress widened the law again and again. The 1966 amendments brought in large parts of retail and service work, schools, hospitals and some farmworkers for the first time. The 1974 amendments extended minimum-wage protection to most domestic workers. In 2013, the Labor Department issued a rule, which took effect in 2015, that brought most home care workers employed through agencies under the minimum wage and overtime rules after decades of exclusion under a companionship exemption.

Each of those changes came from organizing. Civil rights groups, farmworker unions and domestic workers' associations pushed for them, often for years, and often against the same arguments about cost and administration that had been made in 1938.

Some exclusions remain. Farmworkers are still exempt from the federal overtime requirement, though several states, among them California, Washington and New York, have moved to require overtime pay for agricultural work under their own laws. Tipped workers can still be paid a lower cash wage under federal law as long as tips bring them up to the minimum. And the federal minimum itself, as of 2026, has not been raised since 2009.

Why the story still teaches

I think the lesson of 1938 is double-edged, and progressives should hold both edges.

The first is that big, durable change is possible even against a hostile court and a hostile committee. It took a constitutional shift, an organized constituency, a pair of Southern primaries that showed members their voters were ahead of them, and a cabinet secretary who never stopped pushing. Perkins was in office for twelve years, the whole of Roosevelt's presidency, and she used every one.

The second is that the deals made to pass a law can last longer than anyone intends. The exclusions written in 1938 shaped who had a protected wage for decades and still shape who works without overtime pay. When a coalition trades away the people with the least power to secure the votes of those with the most, the bill is not finished. It is a first draft, and someone has to come back for the rest.

The child labour rules, then and now

The child labour provisions get less attention than the wage and the hours, but for reformers of Perkins's generation they were the heart of the matter. Campaigners had spent decades photographing children in mills, mines and canneries and lobbying state by state, and a constitutional amendment to let Congress regulate child labour had been sent to the states in 1924 and stalled. The 1938 law did by statute what the amendment had failed to do, and after the Darby decision there was no longer any doubt that Congress had the power.

Those rules are not fixed history. In recent years several states have loosened their own child labour laws. Arkansas, for example, in 2023 stopped requiring children under 16 to obtain a state work permit. Federal rules still apply where the federal law reaches, and the Labor Department has reported rising numbers of child labour violations, including children found working dangerous overnight cleaning shifts at meatpacking plants. The fight Perkins and her allies thought they had won keeps needing to be won again.

What you can do

• Look up your state's floor. Most of the action on wages since 2009 has been in the states. The state-by-state minimum wage table shows every state's current rate, so you can see whether yours is still at the federal minimum.
• Back the workers the 1938 law skipped. Farmworker and domestic worker groups still lead the fight on overtime and basic protections. The organizations directory lists unions, immigrant-rights groups and legal-aid nonprofits by state.
• Watch the union side of the story. The wage floor and collective bargaining grew up together. The labor page shows the newest union elections the NLRB has counted and how membership has changed over time.
• Read the long fight in context. The arguments of 1938, about cost, jobs and who deserves protection, return in nearly every debate on workers and unions. Knowing how they were answered once makes them easier to answer again.