U.S. v. Darby Lumber: The Triumph of Fair Labor Standards John A. Fliter

It has been nearly two decades since the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was amended to increase the federal minimum wage to where it presently sits at $7.25 an hour. As the act thus begins to feel like a relic of the past, John A. Fliter’s book U.S. v. Darby Lumber: The Triumph of Fair Labor Standards provides a painstaking account of the history behind the passage of the law and the Supreme Court case that ultimately upheld it. Arguably the last piece of major New Deal legislation, the FLSA was also perhaps the Roosevelt administration's most hard fought. Before it became law, regulations regarding minimum wages, maximum hours, and child labor were almost entirely left to the individual states, the vast majority of which harbored a largely laissez-faire regulatory environment for American workers. Fliter's work traces the origins of the debates surrounding the FLSA's key provisions, its eventual passage in 1938, and subsequent judicial review in United States v. Darby Lumber (1941). Although not a scientific work per se (Fliter proposes no theories in the book, nor does he test any hypotheses), the book will be of value to any scholar seeking a rich descriptive account of the congressional and judicial battles surrounding the passage of the law and the debates regarding its constitutionality.