ObamaCare's 30-Hour Full-Time Rule, A Depression Era Idea Going Back To 1937 And Hugo Black

In 1935, Black became chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, a position he would hold for the remainder of his Senate career. In 1937 he sponsored the Black-Connery Bill, which sought to establish a national minimum wage and a maximum workweek of thirty hours. Although the bill was initially rejected in the House of Representatives, an amended version of it, which extended Black's original maximum workweek proposal to forty-four hours, was passed in 1938 (after Black left the Senate), becoming the Fair Labor Standards Act.

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Even before Roosevelt was inaugurated, Black introduced legislation to establish a minimum wage and to limit work in most large industries to 30 hours a week in order to spread available jobs to millions of workers who lost their jobs in the Great Depression. Six years later, Black's substantially revised legislation became the Fair Labor Standards Act, America's first minimum-wage law. Black's Senate committee investigations prompted the reorganization of the nation's airline and utility industries. While most Southern members of Congress selectively supported New Deal proposals, Black usually voted for Roosevelt's policies and often complained that the administration did not go far enough to help the lower classes.

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Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, a champion of a 30-hour workweek, agreed to sponsor the Administration bill on this subject in the Senate, while Representative William P. Connery of Massachusetts introduced corresponding legislation in the House. The Black-Connery bill had wide Public support, and its path seemed smoothed by arrangements for a joint hearing by the labor committees of both Houses.

Generally, the bill provided for a 40-cent-an-hour minimum wage, a 40-hour maximum workweek, and a minimum working age of 16 except in certain industries outside of mining and manufacturing. The bill also proposed a five-member labor standards board which could authorize still higher wages and shorter hours after review of certain cases.

Proponents of the bill stressed the need to fulfill the President's promise to correct conditions under which "one-third of the population" were "ill-nourished, ill-clad, and ill- housed." They pointed out that, in industries which produced products for interstate commerce, the bill would end oppressive child labor and "unnecessarily long hours which wear out part of the working population while they keep the rest from having work to do." Shortening hours, they argued, would "create new jobs...for millions of our unskilled unemployed," and minimum wages would "underpin the whole wage structure...at a point from which collective bargaining could take over."