Fair Labour Standards Act Of 1938 Essay

Principle of Management

Major Federal Employment Laws Research Paper 2

Cole Kropka

5 April 2023

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) established the “federal minimum wage and rules related to overtime pay (eligibility and rates), recordkeeping, and child labor” (Williams 228). Created during the Great Depression and signed into law during President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the FLSA was created due to low wages, long hours, and poor working conditions. The FLSA created new laws that put age restrictions on where children were allowed to work, as well as how old they must be before starting to work. When the FLSA was created it called for a “40-cent-an-hour minimum wage, a 40-hour maximum workweek,

Roosevelt on June 25, 1938. “The purpose of the FLSA was to facilitate better working conditions by establishing federal standards for minimum wages, overtime pay, child labor and employer recordkeeping” (Daniel para. 6). The current minimum wage is seven dollars and twenty-five cents per hour, with the basic minimum wage being raised periodically by Congress (CRS 4). Tipped employees can make less than the minimum wage of a normal worker, with wages being as low as two dollars and thirteen cents per hour before tips. “If an employee receives less than $5.12 an hour in tips, the employer must make up the difference with a higher cash wage” (CRS 4). In my opinion the FLSA is necessary for workers, but there are still issues with the Act. Such as tipped employees having a lower minimum wage. Although with tips they might be able to make more than the federal minimum wage of a nontipped employee, the employers of these tipped employees could hold back tips causing these employees to make less

“The court’s action follows a U.S. Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division (WHD) investigation that found the St. Joseph, Michigan-based janitorial services company violated the FLSA when it failed to pay employees overtime after working more than 40 hours in a workweek” (DOL para. 2). The investigation found that the employer was paying overtime based upon pay period instead of by week, and overtime pay was often calculated incorrectly. On October, 31 2020 the court ordered owner Crystal Middleton to pay “11 employees $10,000 in back wages and liquidated damages to resolve overtime violations of the FLSA” (DOL para. 1). My thoughts on this court case are that this case could have been prevented if the employer had just paid its employees the correct overtime pay instead of trying to find ways around having to pay. In the long run just paying the employees their actual overtime pay would have been cheaper than the costs to go to court and then pay back