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| What Is the Fair Labor Standard Act?
What Is the Fair Labor Standard Act?
by R. E. Peters
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Overview
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), enacted in 1938, sets federal labor standards for employees' wages and work hours. The FLSA requires employers to pay their employees a specified minimum wage for all hours worked and to pay employees overtime for all hours exceeding 40 in a workweek.
The FLSA also contains youth employment, or child labor, provisions that are intended to protect the safety and health of minor employees.
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History
The Fair Labor Standards Act, signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938, was one of the major legislative products of the New Deal. When President Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to serve as secretary of labor in his Cabinet in 1933, she replied that she would serve on the condition that she be able to work for the passage of a minimum wage, overtime and child labor legislation. The FLSA set federal labor standards in all three of those areas, and Perkins was instrumental in achieving enactment of the FLSA.
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Minimum Wage
When enacted in 1938, the FLSA required employers to pay their employees an hourly wage of at least 25 cents. Congress has revisited the minimum wage amount on several occasions since 1938. The current minimum wage is $6.55 per hour, and is scheduled to increase to $7.25 per hour on July 24, 2009. Employees under age 20 must be paid of youth minimum wage of at least $4.25 for their first 90 days of employment.
An employee must be paid for all hours worked, from the time the employee is required to be on duty at the beginning of the workday to the end of the workday.
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Overtime
The FLSA requires employers to pay their employees overtime for all hours exceeding 40 hours in a workweek. The overtime pay rate required by the FLSA is 1 1/2 times an employee's regular rate of pay, and a workweek, for purposes of the FLSA overtime-pay calculations, is seven consecutive 24-hour periods, or a total of 168 hours. An employer is not allowed to average the time an employee works during two or more workweeks. The FLSA does not require an employer to pay a premium rate of pay for work performed on weekends or at night.
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Coverage and Exemptions
Coverage of the FLSA's labor standards provisions extends to the employees of businesses engaged in interstate commerce with an annual gross business or sales volume of at least $500,000. Coverage also extends to employees of hospitals, residential-care facilities, schools and public agencies.
Some categories of employees are not covered by the FLSA. The principal exemption excludes "white collar" workers from the FLSA's minimum wage and overtime coverage. This statutory exemption applies to executive, administrative, professional and outside sales employees, as well as to some skilled computer employees.
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Child Labor
The FLSA and the accompanying regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Labor contain youth employment, or child labor, provisions that limit the work hours for employees under age 16. The provisions also list types of work or occupations that the Secretary of Labor has determined are too dangerous to be performed by minors.
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Enforcement
The Secretary of Labor may file a lawsuit to recover back wages owed to employees because their employer failed to comply with the provisions of the FLSA. Employees may also file a legal action to recover back pay.
Employers may be subject to civil money penalties for violating the FLSA's minimum wage, overtime and child labor provisions, and willful violations of the FLSA may be lead to criminal prosecution.
