When was minimum wage established

Legislation in the Western Industrialized World The first moves to legislate wages did not set minimum wages, rather the laws created arbitration boards and councils to resolve labour conflicts before the recourse to strikes. In , New Zealand established such arbitration boards with the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act In , the state of Victoria, Australia established similar boards In , the 'Harvester decision' was handed down in Australia.

It established a 'living wage' for a man, his wife and two children to "live in frugal comfort" The established similar boards In , the Trade Boards Act was enacted in the United Kingdom, establishing four such boards In , the state of Massachusetts, United States, set minimum wages for women and children In the s minimum wage laws were introduced into Latin America as part of the Alliance for Progress; however these minimum wages were, and are, low.

In the United States and other countries, minimum wage laws were a common demand of labor unions. Australia The notion of a 'basic wage' was first established in with the Harvester Judgement. Dollars per hour. These changes do not explicitly lower the minimum wage in nominal terms but may slow its rate of increase. This means that each province and territory has its own minimum wage. The federal government could theoretically set its own minimum wage rates for workers in federal jurisdiction industries railways for example.

As of however, the federal minimum wage is defined to be the general adult minimum wage rate of the province or territory where the work is performed. France The current July minimum wage in France is set at 8.

To avoid the sometime pitfall of judicial review, she consulted legal experts in forming legislation. Her autobiographical account of her relations with President Roosevelt is filled with the names of lawyers with whom she discussed legislation: Felix Frankfurter, Thomas Corcoran, Gerard Reilly, Benjamin Cohen, Charles Wyzanski, and many others both within and outside Government.

When, in , President Roosevelt asked Frances Perkins to become Secretary of Labor, she told him that she would accept if she could advocate a law to put a floor under wages and a ceiling over hours of work and to abolish abuses of child labor. When Roosevelt heartily agreed, Perkins asked him, "Have you considered that to launch such a program During the constitutional crisis over the NRA, Secretary Perkins asked lawyers at the Department of Labor to draw up two wage-hour and child-labor bills which might survive Supreme Court review.

She then told Roosevelt, "I have something up my sleeve I've got two bills You're pretty unconstitutional, aren't you? Earlier Government groundwork. One of the bills that Perkins had "locked" in the bottom drawer of her desk was used before the "Big Switch. Under the bill Government contractors would have to agree to pay the "prevailing wage" and meet other labor standards. The idea had been tried in World War I to woo worker support for the war.

Then, President Hoover reincarnated the "prevailing wage" and fair standards criteria as conditions for bidding for the construction of public buildings.

This act -- the Davis-Bacon Act -- in expanded form stands as a bulwark of labor standards in the construction industry. Roosevelt and Perkins tried to make model employers of government contractors in all fields, not just construction.

They were dismayed to find that, except in public construction, the Federal Government actually encouraged employers to exploit labor because the Government had to award every contract to the lowest bidder. In , approximately 40 percent of government contractors, employing 1.

The act required most government contractors to adopt an 8-hour day and a hour week, to employ only those over 16 years of age if they were boys or 18 years of age if they were girls, and to pay a "prevailing minimum wage" to be determined by the Secretary of Labor.

The bill had been hotly contested and much diluted before it passed Congress on June 30, Though limited to government supply contracts and weakened by amendments and court interpretations, the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act was hailed as a token of good faith by the Federal Government -- that it intended to lead the way to better pay and working conditions. President Roosevelt had postponed action on a fair labor standards law because of his fight to "pack" the Court.

After the "switch in time," when he felt the time was ripe, he asked Frances Perkins, "What happened to that nice unconstitutional bill you tucked away? The bill -- the second that Perkins had "tucked" away -- was a general fair labor standards act. To cope with the danger of judicial review, Perkins' lawyers had taken several constitutional approaches so that, if one or two legal principles were invalidated, the bill might still be accepted. The bill provided for minimum-wage boards which would determine, after public hearing and consideration of cost-of-living figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whether wages in particular industries were below subsistence levels.

Perkins sent her draft to the White House where Thomas Corcoran and Benjamin Cohen, two trusted legal advisers of the President, with the Supreme Court in mind, added new provisions to the already lengthy measure. An early form of the bill being readied for Congress affected only wages and hours. To that version Roosevelt added a child-labor provision based on the political judgment that adding a clause banning goods in interstate commerce produced by children under 16 years of age would increase the chance of getting a wage-hour measure through both Houses, because child-labor limitations were popular in Congress.

On May 24, , President Roosevelt sent the bill to Congress with a message that America should be able to give "all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, a champion of a hour workweek, agreed to sponsor the Administration bill on this subject in the Senate, while Representative William P. Connery of Massachusetts introduced corresponding legislation in the House. The Black-Connery bill had wide Public support, and its path seemed smoothed by arrangements for a joint hearing by the labor committees of both Houses.

Generally, the bill provided for a cent-an-hour minimum wage, a hour maximum workweek, and a minimum working age of 16 except in certain industries outside of mining and manufacturing. The bill also proposed a five-member labor standards board which could authorize still higher wages and shorter hours after review of certain cases.

Proponents of the bill stressed the need to fulfill the President's promise to correct conditions under which "one-third of the population" were "ill-nourished, ill-clad, and ill- housed. Advocates of higher labor standards described the conditions of sweated labor.

For example, a survey by the Labor Department's Children's Bureau of a cross section of children in several States showed nearly one-fourth of them working 60 hours or longer a week and only one-third working 40 hours or less a week.

One advocate, Commissioner of Labor Statistics Isador Lubin, explained to the joint Senate-House committee that during depressions the ability to overwork employees, rather than efficiency, determined business success.

The economy, he reported, had deteriorated to the chaotic stage where employers with high standards were forced by cut-throat competition to exploit labor in order to survive. Opponents of the bill charged that, although the President might damn them as "economic royalists and sweaters of labor," the Black-Connery bill was "a bad bill badly drawn" which would lead the country to a "tyrannical industrial dictatorship.

Prosperity, they insisted, depended on the "genius" of American business, but how could business "find any time left to provide jobs if we are to persist in loading upon it these everlastingly multiplying governmental mandates and delivering it to the mercies of multiplying and hampering Federal bureaucracy? Organized labor supported the bill but was split on how strong it should be.

In fact, when Southern congressmen asked for the setting of lower pay for their region, Dubinsky's union suggested lower pay for Southern congressmen. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organization CIO , on one of the rare occasions when they agreed, both favored a bill which would limit labor standards to low-paid and essentially unorganized workers. Based on some past experiences, many union leaders feared that a minimum wage might become a maximum and that wage boards would intervene in areas which they wanted reserved for labor-management negotiations.

They were satisfied when the bill was amended to exclude work covered by collective bargaining. The weakened bill passed the Senate July 31, , by a vote of 56 to 28 and would have easily passed the House if it had been put to a vote. But a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats bottled it up in the House Rules Committee. After a long hot summer, Congress adjourned without House action on fair labor standards.

An angry President Roosevelt decided to press again for passage of the Black-Connery bill. Having lost popularity and split the Democratic Party in his battle to "pack" the Supreme Court, Roosevelt felt that attacking abuses of child labor and sweatshop wages and hours was a popular cause that might reunite the party. A wage-hour, child-labor law promised to be a happy marriage of high idealism and practical politics.

On October 12, , Roosevelt called a special session of Congress to convene on November The public interest, he said, required immediate Congressional action: "The exploitation of child labor and the undercutting of wages and the stretching of the hours of the poorest paid workers in periods of business recession has a serious effect on buying power".

Despite White House and business pressure, the conservative alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats that controlled the House Rules Committee refused to discharge the bill as it stood. Children's Hospital of D. Roosevelt , eager to improve the lot of workers suffering in the Great Depression , convinces Congress to enact the National Industrial Recovery Act. The NIRA suspends antitrust restrictions and allows industries to enforce their own fair-trade codes, which raise wages.

As a result, the minimum wage becomes a big issue in the presidential election, with the incumbent, FDR , promising a renewed push. The case, West Coast Hotel Co. Originally, the legislation had called for a cent-per-hour wage, but it was scaled back to win the support of members of Congress from southern states.

But the work came at a cost. Women and children made up more than half of those inside. Pay was low, and conditions were miserable. Lawrence had among the highest death rates in the country. In , after a year-old boy had his leg crushed in an elevator at one mill, workers went on strike. Three people were killed; two as police battled strikers; the third, months later by a group of men who objected to his labor pin.