Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political columnist.
[A]fter all the toil and trouble, all the coming and going, all the backing and forthing, and all the sturm und drang, in the eleventh hour of the fourth day of its nineteenth week, the State Legislature found itself right about where it was at this time last year.
Not to mention that it found itself having to come back the next day and maybe the next week.
That’s because the same two measures it couldn’t get into the statute books last year – a higher minimum wage and a mandatory family and medical leave system – continued to bedevil the lawmakers.
Last year, they passed bills, only to have Gov. Phil Scott veto them. This year, they haven’t even been able to pass the bills.
Worse, they have managed to create a situation in which the two measures are competing with one another, with the Senate refusing to enact family leave until the House passes a minimum wage law acceptable to the Senate.
Negotiations between lawmakers from both houses, usually behind closed doors, continued off and on throughout the day. By late afternoon, legislative leaders said they were near agreement on the wage bill. The chambers would meet into the night, perhaps passing both measures, leading to adjournment on Friday.
Then it all fell apart.
Early in the evening, House Speaker Mitzi Johnson announced a dinner break, after which members would reconvene, presumably to work on the wage and family leave bills.
A few minutes later, she told everybody to go home until Friday.
Now the Democrats who dominate both houses face the possibility that they will work all day Friday and then, if (a big if) they agree on those two bills, have to come back next week to put the finishing touches on both of them.
Only to have Scott veto them again.
Such at least was the prevailing view around the Statehouse. Sen. Michael Sorotkin, D-Chittenden, the Chairman of the Economic Development Committee, said he hoped Scott might sign the minimum wage bill because it would be “more moderate” than the one he vetoed last year.
“It’s truncated to two years (instead of five) and doesn’t go up to the fifteen dollars an hour that last year’s did,” Sorotkin said.
Whether that is wishful thinking remains to be seen. But first, the Democrats have to pass a bill. To put it gently, their continued failure to do so does not make them appear nimble.
It isn’t that they haven’t done anything. They seem to have figured out how to pay for cleaning up the state’s rivers and lakes for the next few decades, a major accomplishment. They also passed laws banning (some) single-use plastic bags, reducing the lead in school water supplies, and (if Scott signs it) making hand-gun buyers wait a day before going home with their purchase.
But considering that they have been talking about the minimum wage increase and family leave since before the session began, their failure to pass the bills comes close to boggling the mind.
So does their failure to close whatever gaps remained on Thursday. Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe said the two sides were not very far apart. They can all tell time and read the calendar. They are experienced negotiators who presumably know how to split differences down the middle.
Perhaps the problem was that one proposal on the table was hard to put a dollar figure on, making it harder (though not impossible) to split the difference down the middle. This was the House’s plan to impose a “pause button,” under which a scheduled increase in the minimum wage would be suspended in an economic downturn.
The political logic of this idea made sense. Democratic House members were getting pressure from the business community. The “pause button,” if nothing else, would be a sign to businesspeople that they were being listened to, perhaps easing the pressure on nervous Democrats, perhaps even rounding up the hundred votes needed to override a veto.
By some accounts, it came close. The delay also gave negotiators time to tweak the family leave bill to make it more acceptable to some House members.
By Thursday afternoon, though, the agreement that didn’t quite get reached called for a straight minimum wage hike to $12.25 over two years. No pause button.
Maybe that’s for the best. Had Vermont enacted a law with that provision, it would have been entering uncharted territory. Minimum wage laws in California, New York, and New Jersey empower the governor to suspend a wage increase during a recession.
A power governors would strive not to use. Minimum wage increases are popular.
At any rate, there has been no recession since these state laws were enacted, so no one knows what the impact of implementing a pause button would be.
It might be counter-productive. Recessions are caused by insufficient demand. The obvious remedy is to create more demand. Limiting the wages of low-income people would create less (or at least not more) demand. Low income people spend almost every penny they earn. They can’t afford to save. And they spend it right here. People who earn $12 an hour are not on the plane to Paris.
There is (isn’t there always?) a counter-argument. Rep. Cynthia Browning, D-Bennington, an economist, pointed out that “the last thing you want to do in a recession is raise the minimum wage (because) if you raise the price (of labor) people will buy less of it.”
Perhaps. On the other hand, suppressing income does no favor to businesses, which will sell more goods and services if their potential customers have more money.
Besides, rare is the elected official who wants to be blamed for passing a law that specifically holds down the wages of low income people in tough times. That elected official might end up seeming as feckless and as confused as the Democrats who run the Vermont State Legislature.
