The popular name of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)—the Wages and Hours Bill—gives you some idea of its stated aims. This landmark piece of legislation, one of the cornerstones of the New Deal, was expressly designed to improve the wages and conditions of millions of American workers.
The new law established the first-ever federal minimum wage (twenty-five cents an hour), a standardized forty-four-hour working week, and a requirement to pay overtime at the rate of time and a half. The FLSA also built on previous Progressive initiatives to stamp out certain forms of child labor.
Taken together, however, these measures had a much broader purpose. They were designed not just to improve workers' wages and conditions but to put more money in the pockets of working Americans, thus significantly boosting their purchasing power. Lack of effective demand would remain a persistent problem in the American economy right up until the United States entered World War II, in 1941.The FLSA, by giving people more money to spend, was an attempt to tackle this problem by stimulating demand for goods and services. The idea was that this would provide a much-needed shot in the arm to domestic industries, which by 1938 were still reeling from the effects of the Great Depression and operating significantly below capacity.
The Fair Labor Standards Act is a law passed by Congress in 1938 and amended many times since. It is designed to protect federal workers from employer abuses. Specifically, the FLSA accomplished three major objectives. First, it mandated a national minimum hourly wage (originally twenty-five cents an hour). Second, it guaranteed that workers who exceed the standard forty-hour work week will receive overtime pay, at one-and-a-half times the employees' regular hourly salary, and limited the work week to a maximum of forty-four hours. Thirdly, it forbade children less than eighteen years old to work in specified dangerous jobs and set limits on the types of jobs children less than sixteen could perform. It also forbade children from working during school hours.
The FLSA was a historic piece of legislation. An oft-repeated story tells how a young girl slipped a note to President Franklin Roosevelt while he was campaigning in Massachusetts, asking for relief because her salary in a sewing-machine factory had been cut from eleven dollars to four dollars per week. Roosevelt reportedly responded, "Something has to be done about the elimination of child labor and long hours and starvation wages." Two years later, the FSLA was born.
https://www.dol.gov/general/aboutdol/history/flsa1938
https://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/statutes/fairlaborstandact.pdf
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