The Political Economy of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

Andrew J Seltzer

Journal of Political Economy, 1995, vol. 103, issue 6, 1302-42

Abstract: This paper examines the congressional passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Voting on it is modeled as a function of the concentration of the constituencies for minimum wage legislation, North-South differentials, and legislator ideology. The House radically altered the final content of the bill, abandoning a proposed Wages and Hours Board with discretionary powers to determine minimum wages in favor of a flat rate following the objections of several interest groups; North-South divisions over the bill had little influence over congressional voting; and the influence of constituent groups increased relative to legislators' ideology as the bill became an important election issue. Copyright 1995 by University of Chicago Press.

Date: 1995
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/601456 full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers. See http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE for details.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jpolec:v:103:y:1995:i:6:p:1302-42

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Political Economy from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().