FLSA - FAQ Law Office Of Rodney K. Murrow, P.A. Attorneys Lenexa Kansas

Question: What is the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and why do we have that such laws regulating wage payment and overtime?

Answer: Wage and hour laws can be very problematic for employers and many well-meaning businesses violate them without realizing...until they get a claim.

The FLSA is the primary wage and hour law in the United States. It governs overtime, the minimum wage and other issues related to wage payment. Understanding the interesting history of the FLSA helps in understanding the law and how it applies today.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), commonly called the Wage and Hour Law, was passed in 1938 during the height of the Great Depression when the country was experiencing extraordinary unemployment. However, workers fortunate enough to have a job often worked an average of 50-60 hours per week, and sometimes more, at that time.

The FLSA required payment of a minimum wage for the first time and overtime at a rate at least one-and-one-half times the worker's hourly rate for every hour in excess of forty hours per week. With workers averaging 50-60 hours per week, the ten to twenty hours of overtime pay over the new 40-hour limit would have been a substantial extra expense for employers at that time. In order to avoid the increased pay of overtime, many employers did exactly what Congress was intending when it passed the FLSA: They hired more workers to spread the work around and lower the average workweek to forty hours. That helped reduce the unemployment that was crippling the country at that time.

So, the reason we have the FLSA is to reduce unemployment. Few people know that the 40-hour work week that is now so ingrained in the American workplace didn't even exist until 1938 and was created solely to reduce unemployment during the height of the Great Depression.