It was 81 years ago that Congress passed and President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act creating overtime pay, child labor laws, and the first federal minimum wage, established at 25 cents per hour.
In a 1937 address to Congress, FDR said, “All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of manpower, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor, and the exploitation of unorganized labor.”
Indeed, the purpose of the minimum wage was designed as a means of protecting the well-being and health of the nation’s workers in the post-Depression economy.
The debate surrounding the minimum wage was Roosevelt’s 1933 description of it as a “living wage.” Adjusted for inflation, Roosevelt spoke of its application as it related to individual workers and the conditions under which some people worked. In today’s dollars, the wage established in 1938 is $4.54 an hour. FDR’s version of a living wage was what one a person could live on.
That’s a critical distinction in today’s debate about the minimum wage. Advocates are pushing for a $15 federal minimum, not so the workers in question have a “living wage” but so they earn enough to support a family of three to four people.
Where it was once a tool to protect laborers against employer abuse, it’s turned into a means by which legislators seek to force employers to adhere to their personal definition of a living wage.
It’s not a testament to Roosevelt’s vision at all.
