House OKs minimum wage hike
After epic debate, some hard feelings, lawmakers agree to $15-an-hour minimum by 2023
“This bill is putting a further nail in the coffin of small business.” Rep. Richard A. Smith, R-New Fairfield
HARTFORD — Premature celebrations, pointed rebukes and hurt feelings left bad tastes in the mouths of some House members Thursday after a sometimes emotional and tense 14-hour debate to raise the minimum wage to $15 by the spring of 2023.
The starkly partisan discussion, which culminated in a full 24-hour session of the House, left lawmakers hollow-eyed and physically exhausted when they finally fled the Capitol after noon.
The debate raged overnight as Democrats rejected eight Republican attempts to change or kill the legislation, which passed 85-59 with six absent. Only one Democrat, Rep. Joseph Boyd of a district that includes Pomfret, voted against the bill.
The protracted debate pitted mostly urban Democrats against suburban and rural lawmakers, whom
Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz later called “the idiocracy of the minority.”
For hour upon hour, through the night, into the predawn, through the morning rush hour and finally into lunch time, they argued over class distinctions, generational poverty, the lingering effects of the Great Recession, stagnant wages, and the role of the General Assembly in the state’s economic future for hour upon hour. The bill was introduced at about 10 p.m. on Wednesday and the final vote occurred just after noon Thursday.
Democrats accused Republicans or prolonging the debate by reiterating questions and taking advantage of the House tradition of unlimited debate.
Republicans warned that nonprofit social service agencies and workers with intellectual handicaps would become victims, and that the bill would provoke more automation. They warned that the bill’s automatic future raises after 2023, depending on a national index on employment compensations, was particularly onerous.
Some GOP lawmakers did not like the way they were treated during the debate, and charged that they were mocked during a debate that, if Democrats could stay together, was inevitably going to won by the majority.
As most of the state slept, Democrats estimated during the rare all-nighter that the pay hike would help 332,000 state workers. Republicans charged that it would hurt an already fragile economy, and put more pressure on business owners, and lead to layoffs, shifts to automated ordering and checkouts, closures and empty storefronts.
House Majority Leader Matt Ritter deferred his usual summing-up spot just before the vote, to Rep. Robyn Porter, who advocated the legislation for years, introduced the bill Wednesday and led the debate. She warned that the state, like the country, seems polarized.
“Where I come from, the struggle is real,” said Porter, D-New Haven, a single mother who worked multiple jobs to raise her two children. “I struggled to make ends meet. That’s my experience. That’s what I lived. I’ve lived a life of sink-or-swim.” She said that
4,300 people in her district would benefit from the higher pay.
“Our families need to have a chance,” said Rep. Toni Walker, D-New Haven, who shortly before the final vote chastised Republicans for “misrepresenting people’s beliefs and thoughts” during the historic debate. She called the bill a compromise.
But Rep. Vincent Candelora, R-North Branford, disagreed. “This was not a compromise between Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “It was a compromise between Democrats.”
“There will be less people working,” warned House Minority Leader Themis Klarides just after dawn in the half-filled chamber, while rank-and-file members stole cat naps. “How is that helping people? I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense to me. We need to take care of the people of this state. We need to take care of the workers of this state. But forcing one mandate after another, and this is not the beginning o the problem. This is the continuation of what we’ve been doing in this state to businesses and workers. There’s a reason why this state is nearly last in coming back from the recession.”
Shortly after 9 a.m., a rumpled Rep. Tom O’Dea, R-New Canaan, offered an amendment on young workers. “If you do that you are going to lose jobs,” O’Dea predicted. “We actually have less jobs now than we had in
2004. The state of Connecticut has lost competitiveness. There’s no dispute. I am absolutely thinking about people at the bottom of the pay scale.” It also went down in a partisan 80-54 with 16 missing.
Just after dawn, Rep. Josh Elliott, D-Hamden, the owner of two natural food stores, said that more money for workers means higher spending for people who immediately put it back into the economy. He predicted that more discretionary income means his stores will sell more.
“What happens is that we increase the quality of life for a slew of people,” Elliott said. “It’s a way for people to literally put food on the table and feel better about themselves.”
At at least two points in the early morning, Porter, who as co-chairman of the Labor Committee was the proponent of the bill, refused to answer questions from Republicans, in a sharp break from protocol.
The higher wage is one of the centerpieces of Gov. Ned Lamont’s young administration — along with highway tolls, recreational marijuana, and paid family leave — and the one most likely to win approval this legislative session, which ends at midnight June 5. The bill heads next to the Senate.
Just after the final vote, Lamont praised the bill.
“Raising the minimum wage will help lift families out of poverty, combat persistent pay disparities between races and genders, and stimulate our economy,” Lamont said in a statement. “This compromise represents a fair, gradual increase that will improve the lives of working families in our state who struggle to pay for child care, afford tuition, put food on the table, pay the mortgage, or cover the rent. I applaud the action taken by the House today and urge the Senate to swiftly approve as well so that I may proudly sign this into law.”
Democratic Senate leaders also praised the House action. The bill would raise the current $10.10 wage to $11 on October 1 this year; $12 a year later; $13 on August 1, 2021;
$14 on July 1, 2022; and $15 on June 1, 2023. Future wage increase would be automatically aligned with a national employment cost index.
“This bill is putting a further nail in the coffin of small business,” said Rep. Richard A. Smith, R-New Fairfield, stressing that he was offended late Wednesday night when several Democrats hugged each other and cheered on the House floor when the legislation reached the floor. “To have the cheering and mocking is a little offensive to me,” Smith said.
“We’ve been begged by businesses in our districts not to do this,” said Rep. Fred Camillo, R-Greenwich, an
11-year House veteran. “I think we could work a little more bipartisanly for the state of Connecticut,” said Rep. Brenda Kupchick, RFairfield.
Sixteen- and 17-year-olds would receive 85 percent of those wages for summer jobs. After 90 days, they would be paid the full minimum wage.
Bartenders would be paid the current $8.23 an hour, while servers and other restaurant workers would make the same $6.38, in what Porter described as a compromise that she opposes because she wanted them to make more money. Employers would be required to contribute money to those tipped employees when their wages fall below those hourly thresholds.
Despite Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz’ admonitions that no celebrations be held in the House chamber after the final vote was announced, cheers erupted from the Democratic rank-and-file.
After the vote, Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, said he was “very proud” that this bill passed, but the debate was also “historic in a negative way, citing the “idiocracy of the minority” repeatedly asking the same questions to Porter.
“What took place in that chamber over 14 hours didn’t need to happen,” he said, adding that the debate on the repeal of the death penalty in
2012 only took eight hours. “We’ve had debates on this House floor that haven’t broken the 10-hour barrier,” he said. “But the two that have, paid family and medical leave and minimum wage: we’re talking about helping workers out, doing things to make our communities better, giving those access to the possibility of a better life. And that’s where we draw the line in the sand?”
Klarides, said the minimum-wage debate represented a “shoddy way to write a bill” and her caucus had to repeat questions because they did not receive acceptable answers.
“That is what we call the arrogance of the majority,” she said. “When you know you have the numbers to pass something, you don’t have to have all the answers. It’s the notion we’ve seen with tolls: ‘Oh we don’t have to give you specifics. Let’s just pass the bill sign it, put it into law and then we’ll figure it out later. That is not how you introduce legislation.’”
House Majority Leader Matt Ritter, D-Hartford, said this vote shows the Democrats represent blue collar workers.
“There was this argument after the election about who represents blue collar workers and blue collar voters, not just in the inner city but in Naugatuck Valley and Eastern Connecticut, where you have poverty,” he said. “Today was a big vote to test that.”