writing assignment-family work health and safety history

Instructor’s Note: It will be useful for you to understand the Walsh-Healey Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act - particularly when enforcement of OSH is examined in the course.

Retrieved 4/2010 from: http://www.answers.com/topic/walsh-healey-public-contracts-act

Act of Congress:

Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (1936)

On May 27, 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) unconstitutional. The Court's decision ended the first effort of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt to address the unemployment of nearly thirteen million American men and women caused by the Great Depression. Within a month, the Senate began considering a bill proposed by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins to address the same problems on a much less sweeping scale, a proposal that became the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act (P.L. 74-846, 49 Stat. 2036).

The Walsh-Healey Act required that all contracts with any part of the U.S. government for goods or supplies worth at least $10,000 must state that:

1. the supplier was a manufacturer or regular dealer in the supplies;

2. all people employed in making or furnishing the supplies would be paid no less than what the Secretary of Labor had previously determined to be the " prevailing minimum wages for persons employed on similar work or in the particular or similar industries or groups of industries currently operating in the locality" where the supplies were made or furnished;

3. no one employed in making or furnishing the supplies would work more than eight hours a day or forty hours a week;

4. the business would not employ boys under sixteen, girls under eighteen, or prisoners; and

5. none of the work for the contract would be done under hazardous or unsanitary working conditions.

The act's provisions—the use of regular manufacturers or dealers rather than "bid brokers" who subcontracted to sweatshops; a minimum wage; the eight-hour day and forty-hour week; the elimination of child labor; and health and safety standards—were measures reformers had advocated for much of the twentieth century to address conditions created by industrialization. The wage and hour provisions were promoted as a means of decreasing unemployment and increasing the purchasing power of American workers.

The act's supporters believed employers would have to hire additional workers to keep their businesses working the same number of hours a week, thereby reducing the ranks of the unemployed . They also argued that requiring employers to pay the prevailing minimum wage would raise wages, allowing workers to purchase more goods from American businesses. The child and convict labor provisions similarly were designed to free those jobs for unemployed adults, as well as to protect children from exploitation.

Proponents of the bill argued that, because the federal government was required to accept the lowest bid for all its contracts, government agencies were often forced to contract with suppliers who paid insufficient wages, or who required workers to give "kickbacks" to cover employer expenses, or who required forty-four to sixty hours of work a week. Opponents noted that the bill defined neither "locality" nor "prevailing" and argued the bill was simply an attempt to reinstate the NIRA and again have the government, rather than the market, set wages. The proponents responded that the Walsh-Healey Act was different from the NIRA because the secretary of labor would not "set" wages but would instead determine the "prevailing" minimum wage that already existed in the industry and locality.

The constitutionality of the wage provision of the act was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1940 in Perkins v. Lukens Steel Company. The secretary of labor's power to determine the "locality" of the prevailing wage as either a regional or a national locality has also been upheld, although the locality determinations for numerous industries have been contested by business. The most significant amendment to the act since 1936 occurred in 1985 when the eight-hour limit was deleted, leaving suppliers free to pay employees for longer hours in a single day, so long as the total number of hours worked in a week remained at forty.

Despite the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937, which mandated minimum wage and maximum hour standards for workers throughout the United States, the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act remains in force.

Bibliography

Brandeis, Elizabeth, "Organized Labor and Protective Labor Legislation." In Labor and the New Deal. Derber, Milton, and Edwin Young, eds. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957.

Leuchtenberg, William E. Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal 1932–1940. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Paulsen, George E. A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man: The Quest for Fair Labor Standards, 1933–1941. Cranbury, NJ, London, and Mississauga , Ontario: Associated University Presses, Inc. 1996.

Reilly, Gerard D. "Madam Secretary." In The Making of the New Deal: The Insiders Speak. Louchheim, Katie, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.

The Fair Labor Standards Act (1938)

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) originated in President Franklin Roosevelt's (1933–1945) New Deal. It was a landmark piece of legislation that had a significant impact on the labor movement in the United States. The FLSA set nationwide standards for employees of organizations engaged in interstate commerce, operations of a certain size, and public agencies. Still active today, it affects millions of full and part time workers in the private sector and the federal, state, and local governments.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the first minimum wage (25 cents per hour) was established. The work week was limited to 44 hours per week, which was revised in 1940 to 40 hours per week. Standards were developed to keep records of hours worked and wages paid. These same standards allowed employers to keep track of overtime owed to employees who exceeded the standard work week.

Perhaps most significantly, the Fair Labor Standards Act banned child labor. Children under age fourteen were no longer legally allowed to work. Exceptions were made for the agricultural industry and some family businesses. Children under age eighteen were restricted from "hazardous" jobs, including mining and some factory jobs. The ban on child labor greatly decreased the number of children harmed by bad working conditions.

A 1963 amendment to the FLSA called the Equal Pay Act prohibited differences in pay based on sex. Under this provision women who were often paid wages lower than a man in the same position could now demand equal pay. The Equal Pay Act was an important step in leveling the often uneven work field in which women competed with men for the same jobs but had to settle for making less money.

Over twenty amendments have been made to the Fair Labor Standards Act. Most of these were made to increase the minimum wage, which has gone from 25 cents in 1938 to $5.25 in 1998.

Enforcement of FLSA standards is handled by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment Standards Administration, Wage-Hour Division. The Equal Pay Act is an exception: it's enforcement was transferred to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1979.

Source: Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History