The History of the Fair Labor Standards ActAbstractAfter the Great Depression, unions were legalized to be the voice of the workers they represented to their employers. Once this legalization became evident through federal statute, the groundwork was laid for what would become the Fair Labor Standards Act. Having just survived a depression, the United States hoped to avoid any future economic recessions. The government would achieve this by paying higher wages that the employer could afford and that the employees could provide for their families. History of the Fair Labor Standards ActThe Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) is administered by the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor. The law regulates child labor, wages and hours, and also requires employers to keep adequate records and which ones to keep (Bennett – Alexander, 2004). The law, now law, requires employers to pay employees at the lowest level of the wage scale, a certain amount that maintains a minimum standard of living and out of poverty (Bennett – Alexander, 2004). This is the law and the theory, in reality the law has caused poverty in some areas of the employment theater, keeping those at the low end of the wage scale; below the scope of higher-paying jobs. The FLSA began on a Saturday, June 25, 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed 121 bills, one of which was the foundational law for the nation's social and economic development: the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (Grossmann, 1978). This law was not easy, the wage and child labor laws had reached the US Supreme Court in 1918 in the Hammer v. Dagenhart in which the Court voted to declare a federal child labor law unconstitutional. Similarly in Adkins v. Children's Hospital in 1923, the Court struck down the District of Columbia law setting the minimum wage for women, during the 1930s the Court's action on other social laws was even more devastating (Grossman, 1978). Then came the New Deal Promise in 1933, President Roosevelt's idea to suspend antitrust laws so that industries could enforce fair trade codes resulting in less competition and higher wages; It was known as the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA) (Grossman, 1978). The President set out to "raise wages, create jobs, and then restore businesses," the nation's employers signed more than 2.