LANSING — A gutted version of proposals to raise the minimum wage to $12 per hour and require employers to provide paid sick time for employees are on a fast track to receive final passage Tuesday in the House of Representatives.
The bills, which were born out of a citizen-led ballot proposal, were passed in the House Michigan Competitiveness Committee Tuesday morning after less than one hour of testimony. They have already passed the Senate and are expected to get a vote in the House later today.
Instead of raising the minimum wage to $12 per hour by 2022, the bills call for it reaching that level in 2030. And the wages for tipped workers such as bartenders and wait staff, who also were supposed to see a $12-hour wage more gradually by 2024, will only rise to $4.52 by 2030.
Tracy Pease, a Hazel Park resident and waitress for the last 30 years, told the committee, “I started waitressing in 1989 and I was making $2.52 an hour. In the span of nearly 30 years, I’ve gotten a $1 raise … You’re not obligated to tip me, but you’re obligated to listen to the 373,000 people who wanted this on the ballot.”
Paid sick time, which was supposed to accrue to one hour for every 30 hours worked, or 72 hours per year, is cut to one hour for every 40 hours worked, or 36 hours per year. And businesses with 50 or fewer employees are exempted from the paid sick time provisions. The ballot proposal would have exempted businesses with five or fewer employees.
Sen. David Hildenbrand, R-Lowell, sponsored the minimum-wage bill and said he doesn’t believe in government-mandated wages.
“It should be decided by the marketplace and between management and employees,” he said. “Michigan has one of the highest minimum wages compared to other Midwestern states.”
The bills have the support of the business community, which said the laws would have a devastating effect on businesses and would end up with higher prices for goods and people losing their jobs.
“This would be truly crippling to the restaurant and hospitality industry,” which employs 600,000 people in Michigan, said Robert O’Meara, of the Michigan Restaurant Association. “Michigan would lose up to 20,000 restaurant jobs.”
But a couple of hundred people crammed into three small committee rooms heckled the legislators and shouted “shame, shame” after the committee voted 6-3 along party lines — with Republicans supporting and Democrats opposing — to move the bills to the full House.
Democrats offered amendments that would make members of the Legislature and state officials abide by the same rules in the two bills, but were voted down. They also argued that former Attorney General Frank Kelley issued an opinion in 1964 that the Legislature couldn't adopt and amend a citizen-initiated proposal in the same legislative session.
But Attorney General Bill Schuette, who lost his bid for the governor's office on Nov. 6, offered a contradictory opinion Tuesday, saying, "The language of the Constitution and the subsequent decisions by Michigan courts cast doubt, however, cast doubt on the validity of this conclusion ... Legislatively enacted initiated laws are subject to the same processes regarding amendment as legislation drafted by the Legislature. And since nothing in the Michigan Constitution prohibits the Legislature from amending legislation it drafts during the same legislative session in which it was enacted, it follows that the Legislature may do so as well with respect to an enacted initiated law."
Mark Totten, who ran for Attorney General in 2014 and lost to Schuette, said on Twitter that the opinion, "flys (sic) in the face of common sense ... would allow legislature to endlessly frustrate right to initiative."
And hundreds of people who protested in the Capitol Tuesday agreed.
"We voted for blue. Not for you," they chanted. "Hey, hey, ho, ho. Lame duck has got to go."
Though they spoke of protecting paid sick time, the environment and an increasing minimum wage, the protesters gathered at the Capitol building Tuesday were largely united on a single issue: Lame duck is bad government, and it has to go.
"It just undermines democracy," Abel Delgado, 21, of Flint said. "We don't have a voice."
Delgado was among hundreds of protesters at the Capitol rotunda on Tuesday protesting a host of bills put forward in the so-called lame duck session, the short window after the election when Michigan Republicans will maintain their current majority in the House, Senate and Governor’s office.
The votes unraveled laws passed earlier this year to raise the minimum wage from $9.25 to $12 per hour and require employers to provide paid sick time for workers.
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Progressive groups successfully gathered enough signatures to get the two issues on the Nov. 6 general election. But the Legislature swooped in and approved the two citizen-led initiatives. That effort in September, however, was more about keeping the issues off the Nov. 6 ballot and giving the Legislature the power to adopt and then amend the two laws with a simple majority. If the proposals had gone to the ballot and been passed by voters, it would take a ¾ majority to amend the laws.
Two days after the election results were tallied, the changes to the two bills were introduced and were among the first bills to be taken up in this lame- duck legislative session.
The Republicans in the Legislature want to make the changes before Jan. 1, when Gov.-elect Gretchen Whitmer, an East Lansing Democrat, is sworn in and before the GOP majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives shrink.
Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.
