The Deeper Dig is a weekly podcast from the VTDigger newsroom. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
A paid family leave plan that’s been a Democratic priority for years has finally passed the Legislature. But its path forward largely depends on winning the support of lawmakers who say it doesn’t go far enough.
Ten Democrats and Progressives voted against the legislation, which would provide Vermonters up to 12 weeks off of work to care for a newborn child, and eight weeks to care for an ailing family member. Those votes would be critical to overriding a likely veto by Gov. Phil Scott.
Rep. Randall Szott, D-Barnard, has been vocal about what he sees as the bill’s shortcomings. After the Senate removed a provision to provide temporary disability insurance, or TDI, from the bill last spring, Szott pulled his support.
“That’s the benefit that most people need,” he said before Thursday’s floor debate. “It would be like offering universal health care and not covering heart disease.”
Szott said the compromises that produced the final bill left out liberal House members. “My observation is that moderates in the building and/or more conservative Democrats are much more likely and willing to flex their political muscle than the progressives are,” he said. “I feel like our votes are often taken for granted. And so negotiations never really come our way.”
House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, is confident that some dissenters would choose to support a veto override.
“Making a political statement saying, ‘Hey, we don’t want to be ignored because we really wanted this other thing,’ is really different than condemning the next two to six to eight years of new parents or people with a dying spouse … to having to just cobble something together the way people do now,” Johnson said after the vote.
In this week’s podcast, VTDigger’s Xander Landen explains why the paid leave bill may be in peril.
**Podcast transcript**
This week: a paid family leave plan that’s been in the works for more than two years has finally passed the Legislature. But its path forward largely depends not on the lawmakers who think it’s too expensive — but on the ones who say it doesn’t go far enough.
I met our politics reporter Xander Landen in the Statehouse on Friday to talk about the tensions around this bill.
Xander Landen: So yesterday, the House voted on the paid family leave bill, which has been an ongoing priority for Democrats in the Statehouse in Vermont for the last few years. There was a big fight last year over how the policy should look. The House and the Senate were sort of dueling over the paid family leave bill and the minimum wage bill, and couldn’t get it done last year. They adjourned without advancing either of these bills. Over the break between last summer and now, they came to an agreement and pretty swiftly got it together and got it to the floor of the Senate and the House.
So this was the vote on that agreement.
Landen: This was a vote on that agreement.
House Speaker Mitzi Johnson: H.107, an act relating to paid family and medical leave, it was referred to the committee of conference on the disagreeing votes of the two houses.
Landen: So what happened yesterday was a vote that sort of reflected the compromise that had been made on this legislation, because you had both people on the right, and on the far left opposing the bill. You had people on the right who have always opposed this bill because they think it’s too costly. It’s basically a $30 million payroll tax that would fund this paid family leave program.
Rep. Scott Beck: Our wages are average, our taxes are high. And at this point in time, to dig into Vermonters pockets, working Vermonters pockets, for another $29 million just does not feel like the right thing to do.
Landen: And you have a lot of more moderate Democrats that say that this isn’t a good idea. You shouldn’t be imposing another sort of mandate on workers.
And then you have people on the left who are opposing the bill because they don’t think that it goes far enough in offering benefits. They think that the program should be more generous. They think that a version of the bill that the House passed last year is much better for a variety of reasons and are willing to spend more money on a program that’s more robust.
Rep. Selene Colburn: Like so many of you, I believe in the tremendous value a paid family and medical leave program benefit will bring to Vermonters, but at some point, I think we have to ask ourselves what the cumulative impacts of these compromises are. And most importantly, we have to ask who’s left behind.
Landen: So what became clear yesterday is that the House does not at this point have the votes to survive a veto from the governor.
Got it. The bill passed—
Landen: The bill passed, but what we learned yesterday is that there’s a very good chance that this bill, even though it has the support of the majority of the House and the Senate, there’s a strong chance, or a real possibility, that it won’t become law this year.
Why?
Landen: Because the vote, which came out 89 to 58, is not strong enough to survive a veto from the governor, and Governor Phil Scott will almost certainly veto the paid family leave bill that is now heading to his desk.
Scott: Our goals in this area are so similar, but our approach to getting there is vastly different.
Landen: This week he gave his budget address, he said he couldn’t support the bill because, you know, it’s a $30 million payroll tax.
Scott: I hear every day that one of the major hurdles to staying or relocating here is the affordability of life in Vermont. This includes taxes and fees. That’s why I cannot support a new $29 million payroll tax on working Vermonters.
Landen: He had pitched his own version of paid family leave that would be a voluntary program that sort of leverages the state workers in the state to create an insurance pool that employers and employees can opt into. He doesn’t like that this is something that anyone basically with a job has to contribute money, contribute their salary, to help pay for. He vetoed a paid family leave program in 2018 because it had the same funding mechanism. And he will, you know, almost certainly veto this bill.
You need 100 votes to beat a veto, and because you have people on the left and people on the right in the party splintering off, at this point, there isn’t the support. Now that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to get there. There’s a very good chance that they could, because as the Speaker yesterday said, a vote on a veto override is much different than a vote on the floor.
Johnson: Making a political statement saying, ‘hey, we don’t want to be ignored, because we really wanted this other thing’ is really different than condemning the next two to six to eight years of new parents or people with an aging parent or dying spouse, or somebody who’s taking in their niece, nephew, grandchild because of an opiate issue and condemning them to having to just cobble something together the way people do now.
Landen: Sounds like it’s more, you’re going to let them make the decision versus pressure them to vote one way or the other.
Johnson: I usually find that conversations work better than arm twisting.
Landen: A veto override vote vote is basically saying that you’re willing to stand with the governor and block something from becoming law. And there’s a good chance that Progressives, the left-leaning folks that voted against the bill yesterday, were doing it on principle, because they’d like to see a better version of this program. But when it comes down to the wire, they’re not going to stand in the way of a paid family leave program actually, you know, being able to help workers as soon as possible and get something up and running.
Got it. I want to take a step back and break down how these different factions kind of splintered off along the way. Let’s start out with just the general reason that Democrats wanted to see this program in the first place. What is their basic argument for why Vermont needs a paid family leave program like this?
Landen: Democrats have been, across the country, not just in Vermont but across the country, have been pitching paid family leave as sort of an essential benefit that states need to start introducing because, unlike a lot of countries around the world, the U.S. does not have a robust system that give protections and offer workers the opportunity to take time off, or extensive time off, to care for a sick family member or a newborn child.
Rep. Tom Stevens: Madam Speaker, if we speak about our economy as an engine, paid family medical leave is a spark plug. It’s a new spark plug that can help the engine work at a higher revolution. And let’s remember why. When a Vermonter can take bonding leave, babies and families are healthier. When a Vermonter can take care of a family member, be it a child, a spouse or a parent, families are healthier. And when Vermonters have an opportunity to deal with their own illness without the stress of losing their job, they end up healthier. And when they return to the workplace, they work better. They’re more loyal, and they stay in their job longer, all of which benefits themselves and their employers.
Landen: This program that passed yesterday would offer new parents 12 weeks to take care of a newborn child, eight weeks to care for a sick family member. You know, some substantive time to address sort of pivotal life events.
At the same time, they’re also pitching it as a way to attract more workers to the state. You know, we have a demographic crisis here, what’s been billed as such, you know, our population is aging at a rapid rate, our workforce is shrinking. So there’s this idea that if you have a better paid family leave program, more workers would be attracted to the state to settle down here, have kids. and certain protections that offer them opportunities that aren’t available elsewhere.
When did we start to see some Progressives and Democrats start to splinter off from this bill, this proposal?
Landen: The left-leaning members, Progressives and some Democrats, that want to see a more robust program started — well, they didn’t technically start to splinter up, but they didn’t like the version of paid family leave that passed the Senate last year. Because the Senate really shrunk the program that the House had created. They wanted to bring down the cost of the program, senators, the prior version of the program would be a lot more expensive: $80 million a year. They shrunk it down to $30 million a year. And the way they did that is one of the biggest expenses was something called temporary disability insurance — TDI, as you hear it referred to on the House floor. What that is is insurance let you take time off for personal medical issues, personal injuries, people on the left in the House say that that’s an essential benefit that should be included in any paid family leave program that the House passes.
Randall Szott, he’s a representative from Barnard. He’s been one of the main opponents of the paid family leave bill, the compromise bill. He pointed out sort of what he viewed as sort of a big flaw in the bill, the fact that you don’t have this temporary disability insurance, and he said, you could take time off under the program to care for your sick loved one who has cancer, but you yourself, if you had cancer, could not take time off under the program to get the medical care that you need.
Szott: This is a completely backwards approach. Your spouse can be paid to take you to chemotherapy, but you have to take unpaid time to get the treatment yourself.
Landen: So that’s really the biggest flaw for Progressives and left-leaning folks. Another problem is that they take issue with the fact that it’s going to be run by a private insurance company and not the state, on principle, they don’t like that idea. They also don’t like the idea that it wouldn’t cover self-employed people, it would only cover people that are employed by a company or whatever. So they think that these are issues that are so essential to the bill that they were willing to vote against this bill because didn’t include those things.
Got it.
In the leadup to Thursday’s vote, both camps worked to shore up their support. Representative Robin Scheu, who helped write the bill, held a press conference Wednesday morning to talk about the program’s benefits.
Rep. Robin Scheu: Parents should have the security of being able to welcome a new child, care for a sick family member, without fear of losing income or being fired. A strong universal paid family leave program will support the health, well-being and economic security of our children, our families and small businesses, and ensure that the next generation has a bright future.
Meanwhile, Randall Szott was encouraging lawmakers to vote no. On Monday he published a VTDigger commentary calling the legislation a “zombie bill.” I talked to him before Thursday’s vote about what he meant.
Szott: Well, the metaphor that I was trying to draw was that zombies often look like humans from a distance. But when you get up close, and you really examine them, you realize that they’re missing key features, either their brains or their hearts or their soul. And this bill seems to me to be missing at least all three of those.
I’m assuming you’re talking about the Disability Insurance piece of this that got taken out by the Senate last year.
Szott: Yeah, that’s a crucial piece of paid family leave programs throughout the country, we’d be the only state that has a paid leave program that doesn’t have TDI as part of the universal coverage. And that’s the benefit that most people need. It would be like offering universal health care and not covering heart disease.
What is it about coupling that with family leave, like why do they have to be in the same bill? What is it that makes those things necessary to put together?
Szott: So this is somewhat outside my expertise, all I can say is that the advocates say it needs to be baked in or started with and every state that’s implemented has done the same, we would be taking a risky approach, we will be going counter to the wisdom of other states and to the wisdom of the advocates on the issue.
What is the risk there, do you think? What will be the potential consequences of passing something that’s weaker than you think it should be?
Szott: In the case of leaving out TDI, as I mentioned, it’s the most used benefits. So if you create a social insurance program that does not have public buy-in, you risk losing support to change it down the road, because one of the arguments that we’re hearing is that we’ll fix it later. But if you have a program that seems useless, and already has sort of expended political capital to get the weakest version through, it’s going to be even harder to get the stronger version through, so you use your political capital to get the strongest version through and then make the small changes later.
Landen: You know, as there is with any sort of major vote, yeah, there was a little bit of drama this week. And I would say that, you know, while the Progressives and the people that aren’t happy with this bill, you may ultimately end up supporting it because they don’t want to stand in the way of a program getting up and running next year, they certainly, in one sense, won this political battle, because they really kind of forced the Democrats who are backing it to sort of defend it on the House floor yesterday, you know, they had to sort of defend or acknowledge that this isn’t a perfect program. We know that this isn’t, you know, what we passed last year. But sometimes, you know, compromise is what you have to do to get things done.
Szott: I think that there’s, again, I’ve got a very limited amount of time inside this building. But my observation is that moderates in the building and/or more conservative Democrats are much more likely and willing to flex their political muscle than the Progressives are. And when I say the Progressives, I mean both the little p progressives and the big P Progressives. I feel like our votes are often taken for granted. And so negotiations never really come our way. They go with the moderates, and we always sort of cater to what they’re willing to come along with. And they don’t get placed in the same box that Progressives do.
I mean, how does that change? Do you feel like taking a stand like this on a bill like this is a step in the right direction?
Szott: Taking a stand on this issue, using your power — if you never use your power, you don’t have your power. And so just like many of the advocates that are being pressured to abandon their points of view on this bill, if they don’t take a stand, if they don’t stand up and dig in, they’ll always be taken for granted. At some point, you have to dig in. Maybe this isn’t the right issue, but it feels like the right issue for me.
Xander, what do we think happens next with the paid leave bill?
Landen: Well, the bill now goes to the governor’s desk, and the governor is going to have five business days to make a decision on the bill, and he will almost certainly veto the bill. And then Democrats are going to have to decide whether they want to hold a vote to override the veto. And they would almost certainly do that. They would certainly do that if they knew they had the votes, but if they don’t, if they determine that they’re not going to be able to flip people, or that people won’t flip on their own, they probably wouldn’t hold a vote and say, you know, we just don’t have the support. But I think it’s likely they’re gonna, you know, really push for that, people are gonna have to really reconsider their votes, even the chair of the Progressive Caucus yesterday, Robin Chestnut-Tangermen, who voted against the bill yesterday, acknowledged that it’s a different thought process for the override vote, and it’s not about the principles as much as it is, are we really going to let the governor stand in the way of a program here? So it’s kind of complicated, it is going to come down to the wire and there’s a very good chance the bill doesn’t doesn’t make it this year. That would be a big blow for Democrats.
Xander, thanks for taking the time. I’ll let you get back to it.
Landen: You bet. Thanks, Mike.