Marian Birge, a highly experienced employment lawyer practicing in California, offers an informed perspective on the basis of wage and hour protections for employees in the state and illustrates where employers most often fall short of legal requirements.
The federal FLSA (29 USC §201 et seq.) was a landmark law enacted in 1938 to establish a minimum wage for workers and restrict exploitive child labour. The history of federal, state and industry efforts to institute pro-labour legislation is fascinating. Briefly, prior to 1938, the Supreme Court had expressed profound hostility toward wage and hour laws; as examples, it held that a federal child labour law was an unconstitutional imposition on state authority under the guise of commerce power1 and struck down a District of Columbia law that set minimum wages for women and children, finding it an intolerable legislative interference with freedom of contract.2
President Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, was an indispensable ally in pushing through an ultimately successful bill that, though greatly changed, was revolutionary in linking minimum wages to subsistence levels and basic decency. She was also the first woman ever to...
The Dangote Group has dismissed as false and malicious claims of a rift between its President, Aliko Dangote, and the Chairman of Heirs Holdings, Tony Elumelu, and also rejected allegations that h...