After a few days at home enjoying Adele's special private "hero" treatment, John had to leave Gentle Country and return to the company's office. Pen @ fun @ pavilion wWw. ｂｉｑUｇE。 ｉｎｆｏ

The Johann family of three was scheduled to travel to Europe with his father-in-law, De Garno, on a Normandy cruise ship in a few days, and they have already booked their tickets to the World Cup final in France on June 19. But before he could leave for Europe, John had a tricky problem to solve.

Shortly after Congress voted to pass the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act on 1 June, another bill, the Fair Labor Standards Act, was passed. Both laws will be officially enacted at the end of June after being signed by President Roosevelt.

For the first time, the Fair Labor Standards Act, also known as the Wage Hours Act, clearly stipulates the minimum wage and working hours for workers: "The maximum working hours in the first year shall be 44 hours per week; 42 hours in the second year and 40 hours thereafter; The minimum wage is 25 cents per hour in the first year, 30 cents in the second year, and 40 cents in the next six years. ”

John had to complete the combing of the salary standards and labor intensity of all employees in the company before going to Europe, and come up with a proper response plan to avoid becoming the target of the new regulations. In fact, when the Fair Labor Standards Act passed Congress, capitalists across the country were essentially doing the same thing as John.

It is clear to everyone that the situation is completely different from when the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (the Wagner Act) was first passed.

At that time, the capitalists saw the Wagner Act as some kind of strategy adopted by Roosevelt in order to win the second presidential election. They saw this as nothing more than a "political ploy" by the Democratic Party, which controlled Congress, in order to help Roosevelt "cheat" the support of the union leaders and win the votes of the workers.

Even though the Act explicitly recognized for the first time the rights of trade unions to collective bargaining, the trade unions were given a legal means of restraining the capitalists, and the government soon established the National Labour Relations Commission (a committee of five appointed by the President, acting as the equivalent of many national labour courts) to deal specifically with the union-management relationship.

But no one took it too seriously, and the capitalists thought that after the presidential election, the Supreme Court would rule that the law was unconstitutional. Just as they had repealed the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Urban Bankruptcy Act, and a series of Roosevelt's New Deal regulations, they had repealed this "evil law."

But when Jones & Lovelin, America's largest steel company, confidently took the National Labor Relations Board to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court sided with the Wagner Act by a 5-4 majority.

In his ruling, Supreme Justice Charles Evans Hughes said: "We believe that the workers were forced to organize themselves by the necessity of the situation. As individual employees are weak in the face of their employers, and they rely on their wages to support themselves and their families; If the employer refuses to pay the worker what the worker considers fair and reasonable wages, and the worker cannot resign or refuse to be compulsorily or unjustly. Trade unions play a crucial role in giving workers equal opportunities to face their employers. ”

As soon as this statement came out, the capitalists realized that their good days were over. Gone are the days of arbitrary expulsion of unionists under the banner of "freedom of employment".

Radical labour organisations, led by the Federation of Industrial Workers, were encouraged and began to grow dramatically in membership. Beginning with the 1937 auto workers' strike, his labor organizations set off round after round of labor movements in the United States. The Fair Labor Standards Act was also introduced in large part to appease them.

John already had a deep understanding of the term "bourgeois weakness". He knew very well that before the introduction of the Industrial Relations Act in 1946, it was better for capitalists to honestly "pretend to be grandchildren" in front of the guilds. (The Industrial Relations Act, also known as the Taft-Hartley Act, was enacted in 1946 when the Republican Party, representing the interests of big capitalists, won the midterm elections and regained control of Congress.) The Wagner Act guarantees the right of labor to organize trade unions, while the Taft-Hartley Act guarantees the right of management to organize anti-union action. ）

At present, there are nearly 10 million full members of the two major labor organizations, the Federation of Labor and the Federation of Industry. Politicians are afraid of their votes, a force that can influence any election. And the capitalists are more afraid of the guns in their hands. The nearly 10 million union members are strong, blue-collar workers, and the vast majority of them are legally in possession of guns. In Europe, these are all armed forces that have always been enough to seize power in a country.

Fortunately, the workers of the United States did not have the lofty ideal of emancipating all mankind. They are far less involved in political and ideological activities than the labor organizations in Europe. While the European Labor Organization (ILO) debated whether proletarians in various countries should seize power peacefully or violently, the labor movement in the United States focused on fighting for an eight-hour day and limiting child labor. It is no wonder that a certain proletarian political party in later generations has always denounced the American labor organization as a "worker thief."

For capitalists like John, it couldn't be better that these giant labor organizations are willing to sit down and play the legal game. Since they are willing to put their main focus on collective bargaining with their employers, it is better to negotiate with them than to let them rise up and make a revolution. Therefore, no matter how many of these employers are squeezed at the negotiating table by the union representatives, they are reluctant to turn the table.

As for John himself, he didn't mind giving his employees higher wages, better benefits, and more job security at all. He has never agreed with the idea of treating employees as tools that can be replaced at any time, and firing them when the market demand is low; When the demand increases, they get back to the old human resource management model.

He believes that employee loyalty is the invaluable value of a business. If a company doesn't care about its employees, there's no cohesion at all. So at FedEx, John has been trying to provide every employee with a sense of belonging and security.

Compared with the vast majority of companies in this era, the salary level and benefits of FedEx employees are still very good. However, with the enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act, John also encountered a dilemma.

Other positions are easy to say, how to calculate the working hours of thousands of truck drivers in the company?

In this era, there was no GPS satellite positioning, and after the truck driver drove out of the company, no one knew what he was doing on the road. Now you have to pay overtime if you work more than 40 hours a week. It's too easy for drivers to deliberately delay on the road in order to make more money, and to run a 4-hour journey into 6 hours.

FedEx now uses a similar way to paying truck drivers. Drivers are paid based on the number of pick-ups, three dollars for a truckload of goods, and one cent for each additional kilometer if the distance traveled in a single shipment is more than 50 kilometers.

However, the benefits of future truck drivers, like agricultural workers, are protected by special laws that do not apply to the Fair Labor Standards Act. What should John do now? Is it lobbying Congress to submit a new bill?

The company's management held a meeting to discuss for a long time, but no one came up with any good solutions. In the end, it was the legal counsel Donald who discovered a legal loophole.

The Fair Labor Standards Act is a federal law that applies to all workers engaged in interstate commerce and manufacturing goods that circulate in interstate commerce. As long as FedEx truckers don't travel interstate distances, it's in some ways intrastate trade, as long as they follow the laws of each state and aren't subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act.

To be a lawyer is to take advantage of loopholes! John silently gave Donald a thumbs up in his heart.

The vast majority of FedEx's interstate transportation is now done by rail, and with a small number of routes, it is possible to completely avoid the cross-state movement of the company's trucks.

Let's do it for now, John knows that's all he can do for the time being. Who made interstate road transportation so underdeveloped now, who would change the legal terms for your company. In later generations, there will be millions of members of the Truck Drivers Union in the United States alone, not to mention amending a certain clause, and a law specifically protecting their industry has also been promulgated.

Still, before the meeting ended, he told Dvořák and Jacob to raise the truckers' salaries appropriately. Anyway, as long as no worker sues, who cares if he violates the Fair Labor Standards Act.