Will Wage and Hour Rumbles... Affect You?

Victor_V · Nov 4, 2014

Positive Contributions by G/MAN to this Thread

I want to point out that G/MAN has made some very positive contributions to this thread. Also some rants and TMI (too much information). If you get past the latter, there's good stuff.

For example, in msg #5 G/MAN posted a copy of the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) wage and hour exemption as it applies to interstate truck drivers. That's worthy of a thread or even multiple threads on its own. Did you know, for example, that when FDR instituted the minimum wage act, truck drivers were exempted from the beginning?

FDR did not want to hinder the transportation of goods during the Depression, especially food to a starving country, while trying to protect factory workers from oppressive labor practices.

I didn't know that. G/MAN says, "Truck drivers have been exempt from labor laws from the beginning." (Msg #3, first line.) He's right about that, too. That FLSA exemption is the foundation of truckload piece rate pay (mileage) at its heart, its very rotten core.

It's gotta go. Companies would work us 24/7 if they could, and like Garibaldi once said, "Squeeze out all the juice and throw the peel away." (Giuseppe Garibaldi helped unite Italy, against odds took Sicily, then in mostly hand-to-hand combat went inland. The King finally then stepped in with his forces to mop up and hardly said thanks.)

As far as I'm concerned, that FLSA exemption is as outdated and out of touch as a buggy whip. We deserve better. G/MAN sees it as justification. I don't. Despite that we differ about the value of the exemption, its importance cannot be denied. G/MAN is right about that.

I thank him for bringing it up.

dca · Nov 4, 2014

Of course G/MAN is going to view it that way.. he is a strict business man ..

someone to learn from for so long as he is willing to share his knowledge

rambler · Nov 4, 2014

Trucking is not the only exemption from federal wage laws. Restaurants and the airline industry are also exempt.

Ridgeline · Nov 4, 2014

Victor_V said: ↑

Positive Contributions by G/MAN to this Thread

I want to point out that G/MAN has made some very positive contributions to this thread. Also some rants and TMI (too much information). If you get past the latter, there's good stuff.

For example, in msg #5 G/MAN posted a copy of the FLSA (Fair Labor Standards Act) wage and hour exemption as it applies to interstate truck drivers. That's worthy of a thread or even multiple threads on its own. Did you know, for example, that when FDR instituted the minimum wage act, truck drivers were exempted from the beginning?

FDR did not want to hinder the transportation of goods during the Depression, especially food to a starving country, while trying to protect factory workers from oppressive labor practices.

I didn't know that. G/MAN says, "Truck drivers have been exempt from labor laws from the beginning." (Msg #3, first line.) He's right about that, too. That FLSA exemption is the foundation of truckload piece rate pay (mileage) at its heart, its very rotten core.

It's gotta go. Companies would work us 24/7 if they could, and like Garibaldi once said, "Squeeze out all the juice and throw the peel away." (Giuseppe Garibaldi helped unite Italy, against odds took Sicily, then in mostly hand-to-hand combat went inland. The King finally then stepped in with his forces to mop up and hardly said thanks.)

As far as I'm concerned, that FLSA exemption is as outdated and out of touch as a buggy whip. We deserve better. G/MAN sees it as justification. I don't. Despite that we differ about the value of the exemption, its importance cannot be denied. G/MAN is right about that.

I thank him for bringing it up.
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Just a little FYI, congress created and passed those laws, it was a debate within congress that put aside a bunch of provisions that we have only recently revised.

What the real problem is we have a fractured people who are called drivers. most won't lift a finger to get something changed while some will complain but not vote. We have to be honest with ourselves about why we have to deal with this. I don't think it is all that outdated, there is room for things to be changed but if we want to trigger a backlash against drivers, then we should change it so the driver is not exempt.

pattyj · Nov 4, 2014

How about the cooks busboys and ones that don't receive tips,are they also exempt?

rambler said: ↑

Trucking is not the only exemption from federal wage laws. Restaurants and the airline industry are also exempt.
Click to expand...

Victor_V · Nov 4, 2014

Department of Labor Wage, Hour Division http://www.dol.gov/whd/flsa/index.htm

DOL Frequently Asked Questions http://webapps.dol.gov/dolfaq/dolfaq.asp

DOL Minimum Wage Page (e.g. tips) http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/minimumwage.htm

DOL Overtime Page http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/wages/overtimepay.htm

Victor_V · Nov 4, 2014

Some Minimum Wage History from Dept of Labor Web Site

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/flsa1938.htm

Excerpts from official DOL history by Jonathan Grossman
(Footnotes removed.)

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938:
Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage
By Jonathan Grossman

When he felt the time was ripe,
President Roosevelt asked
Secretary of Labor Perkins,
'What happened to that
nice unconstitutional bill
you had tucked away?'
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On Saturday, June 25, 1938, to avoid pocket vetoes 9 days after Congress had adjourned, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed 121 bills. Among these bills was a landmark law in the Nation's social and economic development -- Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA).

Against a history of judicial opposition, the depression-born FLSA had survived, not unscathed, more than a year of Congressional altercation. In its final form, the act applied to industries whose combined employment represented only about one-fifth of the labor force. In these industries, it banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum workweek at 44 hours.

Forty years later, a distinguished news commentator asked incredulously: "My God! 25 cents an hour! Why all the fuss?" President Roosevelt expressed a similar sentiment in a "fireside chat" the night before the signing.

He warned: "Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000 a day, ...tell you...that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry." In light of the social legislation of 1978, Americans today may be astonished that a law with such moderate standards could have been thought so revolutionary.
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More to follow...

Victor_V · Nov 4, 2014

Excerpted from official DOL history by Jonathan Grossman

Courting disaster
The Supreme Court had been one of the major obstacles to wage-hour and child-labor laws. Among notable cases is the 1918 case of Hammer v. Dagenhart in which the Court by one vote held unconstitutional a Federal child-labor law. Similarly in Adkins v. Children's Hospital in 1923, the Court by a narrow margin voided the District of Columbia law that set minimum wages for women. During the 1930's, the Court's action on social legislation was even more devastating.

New Deal promise.

In 1933, under the "New Deal" program, Roosevelt's advisers developed a National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA). The act suspended antitrust laws so that industries could enforce fair-trade codes resulting in less competition and higher wages. On signing the bill, the President stated: "History will probably record the National Industrial Recovery Act as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress." The law was popular, and one family in Darby, Penn., christened a newborn daughter Nira to honor it.
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As an early step of the NRA, Roosevelt promulgated a President's Reemployment Agreement "to raise wages, create employment, and thus restore business." Employers signed more than 2.3 million agreements, covering 16.3 million employees. Signers agreed to a workweek between 35 and 40 hours and a minimum wage of $12 to $15 a week and undertook, with some exceptions, not to employ youths under 16 years of age. Employers who signed the agreement displayed a "badge of honor," a blue eagle over the motto "We do our part." Patriotic Americans were expected to buy only from "Blue Eagle" business concerns.

In the meantime, various industries developed more complete codes. The Cotton Textile Code was the first of these and one of the most important. It provided for a 40-hour workweek, set a minimum weekly wage of $13 in the North and $12 in the South, and abolished child labor. The President said this code made him "happier than any other one thing...since I have come to Washington, for the code abolished child labor in the textile industry." He added: "After years of fruitless effort and discussion, this ancient atrocity went out in a day."
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A crushing blow.

On "Black Monday," May 27, 1935, the Supreme Court disarmed the NRA as the major depression-fighting weapon of the New Deal. The 1935 case of Schechter Corp. v. United States tested the constitutionality of the NRA by questioning a code to improve the sordid conditions under which chickens were slaughtered and sold to retail kosher butchers.

All nine justices agreed that the act was an unconstitutional delegation of government power to private interests. Even the liberal Benjamin Cardozo thought it was "delegation running riot." Though the "sick chicken" decision seems an absurd case upon which to decide the fate of so sweeping a policy, it invalidated not only the restrictive trade practices set by the NRA-authorized codes, but the codes' progressive labor provisions as well.

As if to head off further attempts at labor reform, the Supreme Court, in a series of decisions, invalidated both State and Federal labor laws. Most notorious was the 1936 case of Joseph Tipaldo.

The manager of a Brooklyn, N.Y., laundry, Tipaldo had been paying nine laundry women only $10 a week, in violation of the New York State minimum wage law. When forced to pay his workers $14.88, Tipaldo coerced them to kick back the difference.

When Tipaldo was jailed on charges of violating the State law, forgery, and conspiracy, his lawyers sought a writ of habeas corpus on grounds the New York law was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court, by a 5-to-4 majority voided the law as a violation of liberty of contract.
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More to follow...

Victor_V · Nov 4, 2014

FDR Re-Elected in Massive Landslide

Some Minimum Wage History from Dept of Labor Web Site
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/flsa1938.htm
Excerpts from DOL history by Jonathan Grossman

The Tipaldo decision was among the most unpopular ever rendered by the Supreme Court. Even bitter foes of President Roosevelt and the New Deal criticized the Court. Ex-President Herbert Hoover said the Court had gone to extremes.

Conservative Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish called it a "new Dred Scott decision" condemning 3 million women and children to economic slavery.

A switch in time.

Wage-hour legislation was a campaign issue in the 1936 Presidential race. The Democratic platform called for higher labor standards, and, in his campaign, Roosevelt promised to seek some constitutional way of protecting workers. He tried to pave the way for such legislation in his speeches and new conferences in which he spoke of the breakdown of child labor provisions, minimum wages, and maximum hour standards after the demise of the NRA codes.

When Roosevelt won the 1936 election by 523 electoral votes to 8, he interpreted his landslide victory as support for the New Deal and was determined to overcome the obstacle of Supreme Court opposition as soon as possible. In February 1937, he struck back at the "nine old men" of the Bench: He proposed to "pack" the Court by adding up to six extra judges, one for each judge who did not retire at age 70.

Roosevelt further voiced his disappointment with the Court at the victory dinner for his second inauguration, saying if the "three-horse team [of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches] pulls as one, the field will be ploughed," but that the field will not be ploughed if one horse lies down in the traces or plunges off in another direction."
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More to follow...

Victor_V · Nov 4, 2014

Some Minimum Wage History from Dept of Labor Web Site
Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 http://www.dol.gov/dol/aboutdol/history/flsa1938.htm
Excerpts from article by Jonathan Grossman

Justice Owen Roberts' Famous Switch to Save Nine [Justices]

However, Roosevelt's metaphorical maverick fell in step. On "White Monday," March 29, 1937, the Court reversed its course when it decided the case of West Coast Hotel Company v. Parrish.

Elsie Parrish, a former chambermaid at the Cascadian Hotel in Wenatchee, Wash., sued for $216.19 in back wages, charging that the hotel had paid her less than the State minimum wage. In an unexpected turn-around, Justice Owen Roberts voted with the four-man liberal minority to uphold the Washington minimum wage law.

As other close decisions continued to validate social and economic legislation, support for Roosevelt's Court "reorganization" faded. Meanwhile, Justice Roberts felt called upon to deny that he had switched sides to ward off Roosevelt's court-packing plan. He claimed valid legal distinctions between the Tipaldo case and the Parrish case. Nevertheless, many historians subscribe to the contemporary view of Robert's vote, that "a switch in time saved nine."

A young worker's plea

While President Franklin Roosevelt was in Bedford, Mass., campaigning for reelection, a young girl tried to pass him an envelope. But a policeman threw her back into the crowd. Roosevelt told an aide, "Get the note from the girl."

Her note read:

I wish you could do something to help us girls....We have been working in a sewing factory,... and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week... Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week.
To a reporter's question, the President replied, "Something has to be done about the elimination of child labor and long hours and starvation wages."
-FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
Public Papers and Addresses, Vol. V
New York, Random House, 1936), pp. 624-25.
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