
The impetus for the creation of the department was a series of strikes by mining labor, especially the 1933 coal strike organized by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), during which then-governor Benjamin Meek Miller called out the National Guard to suppress the protests. By the spring of 1934, 90 percent of Alabama coal miners were unionized. Miller demanded that unions notify state labor officials prior to any strike decisions. The coal strikes were followed by similar walkouts in the textile industry. Also in 1934 some 15,000 Alabama textile workers struck at 30 mills across the state. The walkouts soon expanded to a nationwide strike.
Acting on recommendations made in a report by the Brookings Institute, written at Miller's request three years earlier, the Alabama legislature passed the Taylor-Riddle Act at newly elected Gov. Graves's request, creating the state labor department. The new legislation charged the agency with monitoring work hours and working conditions, supervising child labor and engaging in voluntary dispute mediation and resolution. Although the department had no powers to force parties to the bargaining table, it could avert and settle strikes through mediation efforts.

When Frank Dixon became governor in 1939, he consolidated the Labor Department into the new State Department of Industrial Relations, under the Industrial Relations Act. It was then restored as an independent agency in 1943 under Gov. Chauncey Sparks with the passage of the Bradford Act. Not all labor laws were immediately transferred back from the Industrial Relations Department, however. Those relating to child labor and mine inspections were retained by Industrial Relations. Child labor enforcement was eventually returned in January 2000 through an executive order signed by Gov. Don Siegelman. Sparks appointed William Emmett Brooks, publisher of the Brewton Standard, director of the newly constituted Alabama Department of Labor and increased the agency's annual budget to $40,000.

The massive growth of industry during World War II resulted in numerous labor problems and at its conclusion, the dismantling of emergency war-time programs such as rationing and tax credits and the banning of strikes. In 1969, Alabama, like other states, adopted "little Davis-Bacon Acts," which were variants of the federal Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 that required prevailing wages be paid on contracts involving federal money. The state bills expanded coverage to include contracts using state money. This legislation in Alabama was repealed in 1980.
In 1972, through an agreement with the U.S. Department of Labor, the Alabama Labor Department began publishing job-related illness, injury, and fatality reports through a series of federal surveys used by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration to revise and draft new programs. In 2000, the legislature added to the Labor Department's responsibilities a mandate to conduct safety inspections on the state's estimated 20,000 nonindustrial boilers and pressure vessels and in 2003 voted to extend safety inspections to over 10,000 elevators and escalators.

In 2007-08, the department's budget totaled $1.7 million, with state appropriations being supplemented by self-generated inspection fees and federal funds. In 2008, the Labor Department had 18 employees responsible to the commissioner and three department heads. Since its inception, the department has had 19 directors in the cabinet-level position. The title "director" was changed to "commissioner" in the 1970s.
Additional Resources
Acts of Alabama, Act No. 433, 1935 Regular Session, 911-913.
Additional Resources
Acts of Alabama, Act No. 433, 1935 Regular Session, 911-913.
Acts of Alabama, Act No. 161, 1939 Regular Session, 23.
Acts of Alabama, Act No. 298, 1943 Regular Session, 252, 298.
Acts of Alabama, Act No. 315, 2000 Regular Session, 488-501.
Acts of Alabama, Act No. 349, 2003 Regular Session, 903-919.
Annual Reports of the Alabama Department of Labor, 1953-2007.
Pendleton, Debbie. "New Deal Labor Policy and Alabama Textile Unionism." Master's thesis, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, 1988.
Executive Order No. 13, Gov. Don Siegelman, January 4, 2000.
Interagency Agreement. Alabama Department of Industrial Relations and the Alabama Department of Labor, January 10, 2000.
General Fund Budget, FY 2007-08. Montgomery: State of Alabama, Alabama Department of Labor, 64.
Norrell, Robert J. "Labor at the Ballot Box: Alabama Politics from the New Deal to the Dixiecrat Movement." Journal of Southern History 57 (May 1991): 221.
Report on a Survey of the Organization and Administration of the State and County Governments of Alabama. Submitted to Gov. B. M. Miller, Brookings Institute, Institute for Government Research, Washington, D.C., 1932.