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.”