Restaurant compromise passes
Lawmakers also passed compromise legislation Wednesday to settle a dispute between restaurants and their servers over wages.
The issue centered on the hourly wage paid to workers who serve tables and receive tips but spend other portions of their shifts doing work that does not earn tips. Some workers claim they have been underpaid for years by receiving the sub-minimum tipped wage for all hours they worked, even when they weren’t earning tips, and have sued the restaurants where they work.
Restaurant owners asked the legislature to settle the issue to avoid costly judgments.
The bill adopted Wednesday calls on the state labor commissioner to adopt new regulations regarding the service and non-service duties of servers after consulting with the restaurant industry and workers.
It calls for at least 75 random audits of various restaurants to ensure that they are complying with the updated regulations regarding workers earning tips, said Rep. Steven Stafstrom, a Bridgeport Democrat who co-chairs the judiciary committee. The labor department will be required to craft a detailed report regarding the level of compliance or noncompliance with the new law.
The legislation also requires the state to hire three additional wageand-hour investigators in the labor department to investigate the issues.
The measure passed the House in a 125-11 vote and was approved in the Senate by a 27-3 margin.
“I think this is a fair compromise,” said Rep. Rosa Rebimbas, the ranking House Republican on the judiciary committee and a former waitress. “This is new regulations that the restaurants are going to have to follow. … We want to make sure that everyone is doing the best that they can.”
Restaurant owners, including those who have been sued, said they were relying on regulations issued by the state that said servers could be paid the lower tipped wage for non-service work if at least 80% of the work they did earned tips.
“The one thing that the people of this state must be able to rely on is the laws we give them,” said House Republican leader Themis Klarides of Derby. “Not only was there confusion, but people followed the rules by the department of labor and got sued for it.”
Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, a New Haven Democrat, said the bill was “a significant improvement” over a bill that passed on the last night of the regular legislative session in June that Lamont subsequently vetoed. That bill would have sharply limited servers’ ability to sue to recoup wages they believed they were owed. Lamont rejected the bill as “likely illegal.”
“The legislation enacted today avoids the constitutional pitfalls of the prior proposal, which I vetoed,” he said in a written statement Wednesday. “It may have taken us a little bit to get to this moment, but in the end we were able to find a compromise to reform a complex area of law governing restaurant workers and do so with a fair result.”
The bill does not change the current law regarding the minimum wage, which is $11 an hour in Connecticut. Restaurants can pay servers a subminimum wage of $6.38 per hour, and bartenders can receive as little as $8.23 an hour. Legislation that passed this year to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2023 did not increase the tipped wage.
“That’s why many of us have a problem with this bill,” said Rep. Peter Tercyak, D-New Britain. “It is seen as providing nothing to the workers.”
CONNECTICUT POLITICS
Lamont resumes talks on sports betting
Gov. Ned Lamont reopened the door Wednesday to sports betting — a long-stalled issue at the state Capitol.
Lamont discussed the issue during a meeting this week with representatives of the Mashantucket Pequot and Mohegan tribes, which operate two large casinos in southeastern Connecticut. The tribes have maintained they have the exclusive rights to sports betting, while the state has challenged that belief.
“I had a good meeting with the [tribal] leaders, and I think we’re moving toward places where we can reach agreement,” Lamont told reporters at the state Capitol complex. “Look, the rest of the country and all our neighboring states are working hard on sports betting, iLottery and some of the other things that we need to do to make us competitive in this growing economy. I want to do that in association with the tribes. … We’re doing that in collaboration and doing it in a way that mitigates the risk of a lawsuit.”
Lamont is pushing for an agreement that could be ratified by the General Assembly during the regular session that starts in early February.
For months, Lamont had talked about a “global” solution with the tribes to solve multiple issues related to gambling across the state. But that proved elusive with too many moving pieces in the mix.
“I’d like a global agreement,” Lamont said. “I’d like to solve everything for world peace. But in the meantime, I’m going to take what I can get.
“Let’s keep it simple. Right now, the iLottery is important for us. It’s one of the things we had in mind when it came to how we can subsidize community college and move toward debt-free community college. Sports betting, I think, is something where I think we can reach broad agreement going forward.
“What’s new is that we’re finding places where we start where we have agreement. Rather than maybe go for a whole hog, let’s find the places where we think we can get some agreement, move the ball and get something done in the spring session.”
In 2017, Connecticut lawmakers said they were far ahead of other states in laying the groundwork to prepare for sports betting. A representative from Major League Baseball said in April 2018 that Connecticut had the chance to pass model legislation that would be emulated by other states. But now other states have legalized sports betting and Connecticut has been left behind.
Rodney Butler, chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, said in an interview during the legislative session that if lawmakers wanted to move quickly on sports betting, they should allow those bets to be placed at the state’s existing casinos while a global solution is still being sorted out.
“The easy solution, in the interim, if we can’t figure out all the bigger gaming issues, would just be to have sports betting at Mohegan and Foxwoods, and then we can save the more difficult conversations for down the line,” Butler said at the time.
A May 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision paved the way for states to legalize sports betting and so far 13 have.