What did the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 actually do?

It set the first federal minimum wage (25 cents an hour), a maximum work week that phased down from 44 to 40 hours by 1940 with time-and-a-half overtime beyond it, and a ban on oppressive child labor. It covered only about one fifth of the labor force when it started.

Did the Fair Labor Standards Act cover farmworkers in 1938?

No. Agricultural workers were excluded entirely from the original Act. Congress gave them a subminimum wage in 1966 and full minimum-wage coverage in 1977. Farmworkers still have no federal right to overtime pay.

When were domestic workers covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act?

1974. Household domestic workers, housekeepers, cooks, and similar in-home employees were excluded from the 1938 Act and gained minimum-wage coverage in a 1974 amendment, thirty-six years after the law that was supposed to set the floor for American labor.

Why were agricultural and domestic workers excluded from the FLSA?

The exclusion was a legislative trade to secure Southern Democratic votes for the bill. The National Employment Law Project's history of the exclusion states that members of Congress at the time said openly they did not believe Black workers, who made up most of the agricultural and domestic workforce, deserved the same wage protections as white workers.

What the Fair Labor Standards Act did

On October 24, 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act took effect and set, for the first time under federal law, a floor under wages and a ceiling over hours for American workers. The minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. The work week was capped at 44 hours, stepping to 42 the following October and 40 the October after that, with time and a half owed beyond it. Employers could no longer put a child to work in a mine or a factory: the child labor rules barred anyone under eighteen from hazardous jobs outright, and anyone under sixteen from manufacturing or mining work, or from working during school hours at all. It is the law every 40-hour week and every overtime check in the country still traces back to, and it covered, by the Department of Labor’s own accounting, about one fifth of the American labor force.

The other four fifths is the part of the story the anniversary pieces tend to leave out.

The floor, in the actual numbers

The Act came out of the same New Deal Congress that had already tried and failed to pass wage-and-hour legislation twice, and the version that finally passed on June 25, 1938 was a scaled-back compromise from the start. Twenty-five cents an hour sounds almost decorative now. In 1938 it was a raise for roughly 700,000 workers on the day it took effect, and the phased hour reduction (44 to 42 to 40) was designed to let industry adjust staffing gradually rather than absorb a full cut to the work week overnight. The law also created the mechanism that still runs it: the Wage and Hour Division, tasked with enforcement and with recommending wage increases above the floor, with an explicit instruction to weigh the South’s lower cost of living and higher freight rates before doing so. Southern industry got a concession on the substance of the law. It also got something bigger, on who the law applied to at all.

Twenty-five cents was itself a retreat. Earlier drafts of the bill had proposed a 40-cent minimum and a straight 40-hour week; both were bargained down before the version that could pass ever reached the floor. The same pattern runs through the Act’s whole life: the number that becomes the historical footnote is rarely the number the bill’s authors actually wanted, and the gap between the two is where the concessions live.

Who the law simply did not cover

Two entire categories of work were excluded from the 1938 Act outright: agricultural labor and domestic service. A farmhand or a housekeeper in 1938 had no federal minimum wage, no federal overtime right, and no federal child labor protection, because the statute did not reach their job at all, and the omission was deliberate rather than an oversight.

The National Employment Law Project’s history of the exclusion describes it as a “grand compromise” struck between the Roosevelt administration and Congress to secure the votes needed to pass the bill, and names the reason plainly:

“Members of Congress at the time were explicit that they did not believe Black people deserved the same wage protections as white people and that they wanted to preserve the southern plantation-style economic system.”

Agricultural and domestic work were, in the late 1930s, the two occupations that employed the largest share of Black workers in the country, heavily concentrated in the South. Writing the exclusion by industry rather than by race produced a law that never had to say who it was for. It only had to say what kind of work didn’t count. NELP’s own framing of the fix, published in the middle of the following decade, is blunt about what the omission still is: “we must end the racist exclusion of farmworkers from the FLSA’s overtime protection.”

Two exclusions, two different repairs

The two exclusions did not get fixed on the same timeline, and neither got fixed all at once.

Agricultural workers waited until 1966 for any federal wage floor, and what they got that year was a subminimum wage, a lower guaranteed rate than every other covered worker in the country, alongside child labor protections that likewise fell short of the general standard. It took until 1977, nearly four decades after the original Act, for Congress to eliminate the agricultural subminimum wage and extend regular minimum-wage coverage to a broader share of farm employers. Even that repair was partial. Farmworkers today still have no federal right to overtime pay: the FLSA’s overtime provisions exclude agricultural labor by name, a carve-out written in 1938 that outlived every other piece of the original exclusion. The National Employment Law Project counts roughly 2.4 million farmworkers currently affected. A handful of states have written their own overtime rules on top of the federal gap; NELP names Washington and California as states that now require it, which means the same job carries a federal right in one state and none in the one next to it.

Domestic workers took a different, shorter path to a smaller result. A 1974 amendment extended minimum-wage coverage to household domestic service, thirty-six years after the Act that was supposed to set the national floor. Cooks, housekeepers, and other in-home employees gained the wage protection that farm laborers had already been waiting eight years for by that point, and would keep waiting on for overtime.

What “the law was for everyone” actually means

Read the plain text of the 1938 Act and it never mentions race. It regulates “industries engaged in commerce,” sets an hourly figure, and lists exemptions by job category, the same neutral vocabulary a tax code or a zoning ordinance uses. That is exactly how the exclusion worked: a statute can produce a racial outcome with zero racial language in it, simply by drawing its boundaries around the jobs a particular group of people happened to hold. The Act’s defenders were right that it raised wages, cut hours, and pulled children out of factories for a fifth of the workforce covered on day one. Its critics, then and in the decades of amendments that followed, were also right that “the law now protects American labor” was never a fully true sentence, not in 1938, not in 1966, and by the letter of the overtime statute, not now.

The Fair Labor Standards Act is one of the strongest floors American workers have ever gotten in writing, printed with a trapdoor built into it from the start. Congress patched one hinge of it in 1966, patched the other in 1974, and left the overtime clause standing open over the same fields it was cut from in 1938.