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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 37 > Issue 1 (1938)

 

Abstract

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 presents a great many legal and practical problems of importance commensurate with the comprehensiveness of the act itself, which is probably the most far-reaching of the New Deal statutes since the N. R. A. The act is conceived on the theory that any physical handling of goods destined to be subsequently shipped to another state is an act so closely and substantially related to the flow of interstate commerce as to be subject to Congressional regulation, and thus depends for its validity upon an extension of the theories approved in the Wagner Act cases. The act seeks to increase labor's share in the profits of industry, by compelling a fifty per cent. Wage increase for hours of employment in excess of a statutory maximum, and by compelling payment of certain minimum wages for all employment periods. In addition, the act contains a new attempt by Congress to outlaw child labor. The significance of the constitutional issues necessarily involved in so far-reaching a measure is only too obvious. Further, in filling the broad interstices of the rather loosely knit legislative fabric, there arise a multitude of problems of statutory construction and administrative interpolation. Many of these must be worked out by individual employers and their attorneys without the benefit of official regulations, since the effective date of the act follows its enactment too closely to permit the issuance of governmental rules of construction substantially in advance of the time when the provisions and penalties of the act become operative.

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