Fair Labor Standards Act
The FLSA was originally written in 1932 by Senator Hugo Black. He was later appointed to the Supreme Court in 1937. However, Black's proposal to require employers to adopt a thirty-hour workweek met stiff resistance.  In 1938 a revised version of Black's proposal was passed that adopted an eight-hour day and a forty-hour workweek. It allowed workers to earn wages for an extra four hours of overtime as well. According to the act, workers must be paid minimum wage and overtime pay must be one-and-a-half times regular pay. Children under eighteen cannot do certain dangerous jobs. Also children under the age of sixteen cannot work during school hours. There were 700,000 workers affected by the FLSA. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it the most important piece of New Deal legislation passed since the Social Security Act of 1935.