[I]n January, Sen. Bernie Sanders requested a private meeting with the Vermont speaker of the House, Senate president and the lieutenant governor. His plan was to make sure top Democrats and Progressives were on the same page about the importance of harnessing the two parties — and their newly bolstered majority — to pass a $15 minimum wage and a statewide paid family leave program.
For Sanders and Democrats, inroads made during the 2018 midterm election would give them the opportunity to pass proposals in Vermont that the Democratic-Socialist senator has supported for decades.
But ultimately, pressure from Sanders and progressive lawmakers was not enough to get lawmakers to pass either proposal.
Sanders has supported raising the minimum wage, in some form, since the early 1990s when he introduced legislation as a U.S. representative to raise the federal minimum wage from $4.25 an hour to at least $5.50 an hour.
But only in the last three years has Sanders’ decades-long crusade to raise the minimum wage heated up nationally, with almost all of the Democratic presidential candidates embracing the wage increase.
Sanders, both through introducing legislation and his presidential campaign, has also been putting pressure on private businesses — including the online retail giant Amazon, Walmart and fast-food chain McDonald’s — to offer employees a $15 minimum wage.
But in Vermont, he has stayed mostly silent on the debate over raising the minimum wage.
Sanders’ decision to call the meeting in January — a month before he would formally announce his presidential bid — marks a departure from the usual role of Vermont’s congressional delegation.
Eric Davis, professor emeritus of political science at Middlebury College, said he could not recall a time when Sanders, or Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy and Rep. Peter Welch weighed in on state legislative priorities.
“I think most of them would rather focus on the national level and leave state level issues up to the state,” Davis said. “Usually it goes the other way, state lawmakers or governors ask the delegation for help with something that could be helpful to Vermont.”
Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman, a Progressive Democrat who worked for Sanders in the 1990s, said during his two decades as an elected official, Vermont’s U.S. representatives have rarely involved themselves with state legislative business.
“Generally, the federal delegation does not tell the state Legislature what to do,” Zuckerman said. “Sen. Sanders office has always been very helpful in research and facts about the minimum wage and working people’s struggles but he, like Sen. Leahy and Rep. Welch, are not ones to tell the state what to do.”
Speaker of the House Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, said she was not thrilled by a member of the congressional delegation weighing in on legislative matters that she thought were strictly the purview of state lawmakers.
“That meeting was at the request of Sen. Sanders to sit down and talk about what the Vermont Legislature was going to do and from my perspective, I’m happy to work with the federal delegation, but these were mainly issues the Vermont Legislature needed to wrestle with,” Johnson said.
Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, who was a member of Sanders’ congressional staff in Vermont from 1999 to 2001, said the meeting had been a “positive discussion” and a “sharing of ideas.”
But Johnson said she had been more interested in discussing broadband internet development with Sanders and possible federal support for Vermont, which ranks among the worst in the country for cellular service.
After meeting with Sanders, Johnson said she has had no other communication with him about raising the minimum wage or paid family leave.
“It was one meeting we had and then there was no more contact after that,” she said. “Honestly, I had forgotten the meeting had even happened.”
Sanders’ Senate office declined to comment about the meeting, or his response to this year’s legislative session.
Leaving the meeting, Zuckerman said it was clear Johnson was not in complete agreement with Sanders, Ashe, and himself about the $15 per hour wage increase.
“It didn’t seem like the speaker was on the same page coming out of that meeting,” Zuckerman said.
As the legislative session got underway, discussion between the two chambers about the priorities would not go according to plan.
The House decided to levy a $78 million payroll tax to pay for a paid family leave program but water down the Senate’s wage increase proposal — which would have reached $15 an hour by 2024 — to $15 no earlier than 2026.
The Senate refused to support the lower chamber’s paid leave proposal without a more aggressive wage increase.
Neither bill made it to Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, thereby making it possible for the Republican chief executive to avoid having to decide whether to veto or sign the proposals. Scott, who vetoed both bills in 2018, had signaled he would likely veto the bills again this year.
“Sen. Sanders thought that the 2018 election was very clear and that we would have a real opportunity to move those bills that the governor had vetoed in the prior session,” Zuckerman said.
“That was one reason I was frustrated that we had to keep moving backwards from last session’s efforts on minimum wage while [House members] were working to expand paid family leave,” he added. “We could have either expanded them both or at least passed the same measures, instead of just rolling back minimum wage.”
Sen. Anthony Pollina, P/D-Washington, chair of the Progressive Party and former senior adviser to Sanders, said that although the Vermont senator has made raising the minimum wage more popular among the Democratic Party, it’s still not a slam dunk — even in Vermont.
“I think in terms of Vermont, it tells us one thing mainly: having a majority of Democrats does not mean they are all progressive thinkers. It is not enough to have a majority in your party if they aren’t all progressive,” Pollina said.
After the January meeting with Ashe, Johnson and Zuckerman, Sanders remained silent about Vermont’s $15 per hour legislation, even as he continued to call for the wage increase across the country while revving up his presidential campaign.
Ashe and his chief of staff, Peter Sterling, however, made multiple attempts to gain public support from Sanders for the minimum wage bill, according to documents obtained by VTDigger.
In mid February, Sterling wrote an email to David Weinstein, the head of Sanders’ Senate office in Vermont, asking for the senator to prepare a statement about Vermont passing $15 minimum wage legislation.
“Sometime before March 15, the Senate is going to pass a $15/hr minimum wage bill that will be almost identical to last year’s ($15/hr by 2024). Last year, Bernie put out a statement supporting this on Twitter which was really appreciated by us,” Sterling wrote.
“Can we start the process for a similar statement. If it would really help, I can try to nail down a specific date it will come to the floor,” he added.
Weinstein did not respond. But on Feb. 26, Sterling reached out to him again, letting him know the Senate would be passing the minimum wage bill that day.
“A Twitter ready statement from Bernie would be sweet,” Sterling wrote.
Weinstein, again, did not reply to Sterling and no tweet or statement was published on Sanders’ Senate account or on his presidential campaign’s Twitter.
Both Johnson and Ashe said they are continuing work to come to an agreement on paid leave and the minimum wage so that both bills can be quickly passed when the Legislature reconvenes in January.
Martha Abbott, a longtime Sanders ally and progressive politician in Vermont, said raising the minimum wage has been and continues to be a difficult policy to garner broad support for nationally and in Vermont.
Abbott said that after the 2018 election when Democrats and Progressives campaigned on raising the minimum wage and received veto-proof control of the state Legislature, any real excuse for not passing the legislation has dissipated.
“Getting people to say they support the minimum wage increase is different than getting it passed,” Abbott said. “In Washington, D.C., you understand why it isn’t getting passed, but in Vermont it doesn’t make much sense,” she said.
Correction: An earlier version of the article misrepresented a statement by Senate President Pro Tem Tim Ashe.
