With President Obama seeking to raise the federal minimum wage level from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 per hour – a rate closer to the living wage standard – in his campaign to fight against “income inequality,” the firestorm of political debates brings to mind the debates surrounding the first demand for a federal minimum wage during the Great Depression.
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Here are five historical facts about the federal minimum wage throughout the years:
1. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the federal minimum wage into law on June 25, 1938 under the brand-new Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA),
according to the United States Department of Labor.
Roosevelt declared that the bill was meant to give “all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." The FLSA came into effect on October 24, 1938.
2. The original federal minimum wage was set at $0.25 per hour (equivalent to $4.18 in 2014 dollars) with a maximum work week of 44 hours.
According to Forbes, the minimum wage initially affected approximately 20 percent of the workforce.
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3. The federal minimum wage was at its highest in 1968 at the equivalent of $8.54 per hour in 2014 dollars (and after adjustment for inflation),
according to the Pew Research Center.
4. Twenty-nine states, as well as the District of Columbia, have instituted their own minimum wages above the federal minimum of $7.25 per hour. Washington state, at $9.47 per hour, is the highest, and seven states are at $9.00 and above, including California, Connecticut, Oregon, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, according to the Pew Research Center.
5. The last federal wage increase occurred in 2007 when Congress raised the $5.15 per hour rate to the current rate of $7.25 per hour to go into effect in 2009, a
ccording to the Heritage Foundation.
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