Minimum Wage Movement
United States 1910s-1930s
Synopsis
Long before a federal minimum wage was established, American workers in the 1910s and 1920s stepped up a decades-old struggle for a minimum wage law. One pivotal protest in 1912, a textile workers' strike demanding "fair pay for a day's work," made Massachusetts the first state in the United States to adopt a minimum wage law. By 1923, 15 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., had instituted similar laws. Given that women were a vulnerable segment of the workforce, and most minimum wage legislation was limited to female workers, the struggle for a minimum wage was closely linked to the movement for women's rights. A key moment in the minimum wage struggle came with the 1923 Adkins decision, which equated the establishment of the minimum wage with price-fixing. That year the Supreme Court ruled 5-3 in the case of Adkins v. Children's Hospital that the minimum wage law of the District of Columbia was unconstitutional. The first federal minimum wage was finally established as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.
Timeline
