Why Overtime Pay Exists

The short version

Overtime pay exists because, for most of American industrial history, working people had no legal protection against being worked to death. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act made the 40-hour workweek the legal default by making every hour past it 50% more expensive.

The fight

Before FLSA:

• 60-hour workweeks were normal. Six ten-hour days. Sundays off if you were lucky.
• 80-hour workweeks were common in steel. Twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. When shifts rotated, workers pulled a 24-hour "long turn."
• Children worked. The 1900 census counted roughly 1.75 million working children aged 10 to 15: 1,264,000 boys and 486,000 girls. The real number was almost certainly higher, because the census missed children working on farms and in home-based piecework. Textile mills preferred children because their small hands fit into moving machinery and their wages were cheap.
• Workplace injury had no backstop. If the machine took your arm off, you went home without your arm and without your job.

The eight-hour movement started in the 1860s. It took seventy years to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act. In between came Haymarket, Homestead, Ludlow, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the Great Depression. Every one of those names is a pile of bodies that made the law possible.

Why it was "anti-business" then, and why anyone saying it now is lying

The National Association of Manufacturers fought FLSA on both economic and constitutional grounds. They said it would destroy American industry. They said it would cause mass unemployment. They said workers would prefer to choose longer hours on their own.

None of that happened. American manufacturing entered its most productive decades in history after 1938. Unemployment fell. Wages rose. The 40-hour week became so normal that most Americans alive today have never known any other standard.

If anybody tells you overtime rules are "anti-business," they are telling you they would prefer the economy of the 1920s. Ask them if they would like their kids in a textile mill.

Where it stands today

The overtime salary threshold has not kept pace with inflation in fifty years. In 1975 the Ford administration set the threshold at a level that covered about 65 percent of salaried workers. By 2013 that coverage had collapsed to roughly 11 percent, because the dollar figure barely moved while the cost of living kept climbing. Updates in 2004 and 2019 raised the number but did not come close to restoring the 1975 real value. A 2024 rule from the Biden Labor Department that would have meaningfully raised the threshold was vacated nationwide by a federal judge in Texas in November 2024.

The result: millions of salaried workers who were protected under the 1975 threshold are not protected today.

The fight for a living hour is not finished. It never is.

Sources

• Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Maximum Struggle for a Minimum Wage (Jonathan Grossman, U.S. Department of Labor)
• 1892 Homestead Strike (AFL-CIO labor history)
• 1892 Homestead Strike research guide (Library of Congress)
• Steelworkers in America: The Nonunion Era, David Brody (University of Illinois Press)
• History of Child Labor in the United States, Part 1 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Monthly Labor Review)
• 1900 Census Special Reports: Occupations at the Twelfth Census (U.S. Census Bureau)
• Child Labor: An American History, Hugh D. Hindman (Routledge)
• National Child Labor Committee Collection, Lewis Hine photographs (Library of Congress)
• Teaching With Documents: Photographs of Lewis Hine (U.S. National Archives)
• It's Time to Update Overtime Pay Rules (Economic Policy Institute)
• The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) Exemption for Executive, Administrative, and Professional Employees (Congressional Research Service)
• Texas judge blocks Biden administration's rule expanding overtime pay (NPR, November 15, 2024)

Why does your boss have to pay you more for working past 40 hours?

Because in 1938, after decades of strikes, dead workers, and one Great Depression, the United States passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, and a generation of union organizers finally made the 40-hour week the legal default.

Before that: 60-hour weeks were normal. 80-hour weeks were not rare. Children worked full shifts in coal mines and textile mills. If you got hurt on the job, that was your problem.

Overtime pay is not a bonus. It is a fine levied against employers for trying to squeeze more than a standard workweek out of you. The whole point is to make it expensive enough that they hire a second worker instead of killing the first one.

Anybody who tells you overtime rules are "anti-business" is telling you they would prefer the 1920s.

Sources in bio. Share with someone who just pulled a 60-hour week.