Sen. Dick McCormack tried multiple times to get the Senate to discuss a bill that would allow child-care providers to bargain collectively with the state for subsidies.
You might say he tried to attach it to every bill he could find.
But each time, Senate President Pro Tem John Campbell would ask to move on to something less controversial.
McCormack tried to tack it onto an education bill Wednesday and was shot down again.
Senate President Lt. Gov. Phil Scott ruled that the issue was not germane to the underlying education bill. The Senate voted to suspend the rules and discuss the issue anyway, but the 13-13 vote fell short of the three-quarters required to take up the discussion.
The child-care worker collective bargaining bill is a prominent issue in and of itself, but it also epitomizes the underlying issue of how the Senate is spending hours discussing what to discuss without getting to the merits, leaving a backlog of unfinished business in the waning days of the legislative session.
One after another, senators stood up and expressed their frustration with the process.
Sen. Peg Flory, a Republican from Rutland, said when lawmakers try to tack bills onto unrelated pieces of legislation it disturbs the deliberative process, creates more uncertainty for the public and delays the closing of the session.
“It’s really disturbing we all sit here and say, ‘We’ve got to get out,’ then we try to put our bills on any bill we can find,” she said.
But McCormack said he’s not being unreasonable. It’s the pro tem who is playing procedural shenanigans, he said, to avoid a vote on the child-care bill. The Senate has been skipping over the two labor bills, according to McCormack.
“I’m not dragging this out. The Senate pro tem is dragging this out,” McCormack said. “We have two bills on which this is clearly germane. He just doesn’t bring them up.”
The spat between McCormack and Campbell appears to have thrown yet another monkey wrench into the gears of the Senate, causing procedural delays and not yielding any substantive debate.
The child-care worker bill has been a hot-button issue for two years. It passed the House last year but never made it through the Senate.
Campbell has been outspoken about his desire that the bill not make it to the Senate floor for consideration this year. Part of his beef with the bill comes from an interaction Campbell said happened in the fall when members of the local union allegedly tried to bully him into supporting the bill.
On the Senate floor Tuesday, Campbell said the bill could create a slippery slope where everyone who receives some form of subsidy from the state but is not a state employee could engage in collective bargaining.
“If these folks were employees of the State of Vermont, we would have taken care of this issue long, long ago,” Campbell said.
Allowing one group to bargain collectively with the state would invite others to do so, Campbell said.
“The fact is if we have to start bargaining with 100 different groups, it would be detrimental to the State of Vermont,” Campbell said.
The bill would allow child-care providers to bargain collectively on issues related to child-care subsidy payments, including rates and reimbursement.
The Senate-passed budget attached the child-care workers language, and the body voted to approve it.
McCormack said that was not his original plan. He expects it will be taken out in a conference committee. Hence, he has been trying time and again to see if the bargaining bill sticks to something.
Just what happens to the dormant labor bills in the Senate is up in the air. McCormack said they may not go anywhere if the Senate continues to hold them up.
“If the proposition is we can waste the Senate’s time, the reward for wasting everyone’s time is to kill a good piece of legislation,” he said.
Clarification: The early version of this story referred to a local teachers’ union that allegedly tried to bully campbell. Campbell referred to an interaction with members of the local American Federation of Teachers, not the Vermont NEA.
