The Autocratically Flexible Workplace: A History of Overtime Regulation in the United States

The Autocratically Flexible Workplace: A History o f Overtime Regulation in the United States complements, but does not supersede, the author's “Moments Are the Elements o f P r o fitO v e r tim e and the Deregulation o f Working Hours Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (2000). The two books differ in four major respects. First, chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the earlier book, which deal with specialized aspects of the FLSA (the exclusion from an entitlement to premium overtime compensation of executive employees, of workers engaged in so-called preliminary and post-liminary work activities as a result of the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, and of employees of small firms) and comprise about two-thirds of that book, have been entirely omitted. Second, the history of overtime regulation, which takes up the first chapter of the earlier book, has been expanded from about 200 to 475 pages. About 60 percent of the new material encompasses extended explorations of the heretofore hidden histories of the fates of Montana’s constitutionalization of the eight-hour day in 1936 (Chapter 6) and Pennsylvania’s 44- hour week law of 1937 (Chapter 7)—the closest encounter with a generally applicable prohibition of overtime work the United States has ever known—as well as the comparative analysis of the transformative dilution of Ontario’s Employment Standards Act (Chapter 17). As a result, whereas four-fifths of “Moments Are the Elements o f Profit" is devoted to the FLSA, that regime takes up only one-fourth of The Autocratically Flexible Workplace, which is less of a specialist’s and labor lawyer’s book and more of a social and labor history. Third, threefifths of the remaining chapters have been supplemented with additional historical material and updates of the most recent statutory and judicial developments; in particular Chapters 1-4, 8, 14-16, and 18 have been significantly revised and expanded. Only Chapter 5, on Alaska’s eight-hour law, and Chapters 9-13, dealing with the legislative, administrative, and judicial evolution of the Fair Labor Standards Act from the day it went into effect in 1938 until its first significant postwar amendments in 1949, remain substantively largely unchanged, though they too have undergone revision; they have been retained for the sake of the continuity of the analysis. Finally, a comprehensive bibliography has been added.