https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States
Minimum wage legislation emerged at the end of the nineteenth century from the desire to end sweated labor which had developed in the wake of industrialization.[16] Sweatshops employed large numbers of women and young workers, paying them what were considered nonliving wages that did not allow workers to afford the necessaries of life.[17] Besides substandard wages, sweating was also associated with long work hours and unsanitary work conditions.[18] From the 1890s to the 1920s, during the Progressive Era, a time of social activists and political reform across the United States, progressive reformers, women's organizations, religious figures, academics, and politicians all played an important role in getting state minimum wage laws passed throughout the United States.[19]
The first successful attempts at using minimum wage laws to ameliorate the problem of nonliving wages occurred in the Australian state of Victoria in 1896.[20][21] Factory inspector reports and newspaper reporting on the conditions of sweated labor in Melbourne, Victoria led in 1895 to the formation of the National Anti-Sweating League which pushed the government aggressively to deal legislatively with the problem of substandard wages.[22] The government, following the recommendation of the Victorian Chief Secretary Alexander Peacock, established wage boards which were tasked with establishing minimum wages in the labor trades which suffered from nonlivable wages. During the same time period, campaigns against sweated labor were occurring in the United States and England.[23]
Progressive Era
As in Australia, civic concern for sweated labor developed in the United States towards the end of the Gilded Age. In New York state in 1890, a group of female reformers who were worried about the harsh conditions of sweated labor in the country formed the Consumer's League of the City of New York. The consumer group sought to improve working conditions by boycotting products which were made under sweated conditions and did not conform to a code of "fair house" standards drawn up by them. Similar, consumer leagues formed throughout the United States, and in 1899, they united under the National Consumer League (NCL) parent organization.[24] Consumer advocacy, however, was extremely slow at changing conditions in the sweated industries. When NCL leaders in 1908 went to an international anti-sweatshop conference in Geneva, Switzerland and were introduced to Australian minimum wage legislation, which had successfully dealt with sweated labor, they came home believers and made minimum wage legislation part of their national platform.[25]
Massachusetts militiamen with fixed bayonets surround a group of peaceful strikers during the Lawrence textile strike which proved pivotal in the passage of the first U.S. minimum wage legislation (1912)
In 1910, in conjunction with advocacy work led by Florence Kelley of the National Consumer League, the Women's Trade Union League (WTLU) of Massachusetts under the leadership of Elizabeth Evans took up the cause of minimum wage legislation in Massachusetts. Over the next two years, a coalition of social reform groups and labor advocates in Boston pushed for minimum wage legislation in the state.[26] On June 4, 1912, Massachusetts passed the first minimum wage legislation in the United States, which established a state commission for recommending non-compulsory minimum wages for women and children.[27][28] The passage of the bill was significantly assisted by the Lawrence textile strike which had raged for ten weeks at the beginning of 1912. The strike brought national attention to the plight of the low wage textile workers, and pushed the state legislatures, who feared the magnitude of the strike, to enact progressive labor legislation.[29]
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