Vote on minimum wage postponed
House is confronted with threat from labor
The House postponed voting on a minimum wage bill yesterday, after one of the state's most powerful labor unions threatened to hold off endorsements of legislators unless they passed an acceptable version of the measure before 10 this morning.
The House had planned to vote yesterday on the bill, which would raise the state minimum wage from $6.75 to $7.75 over the next two years. But Robert J. Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO, sent a letter to representatives yesterday stating that the group supports an amendment that would raise the state minimum wage to $8.25 an hour, the highest in the country, and guarantee future increases tied to changes in the cost of living.
The minimum wage debate has sharply divided groups representing working families and small business owners, with some saying that low-wage workers desperately need the higher amount to survive in the state and others arguing that raising the minimum wage would take jobs away from less experienced workers and hurt the economy.
Now, lawmakers say they do not know when the House will vote on the bill. The Senate unanimously passed a version last month that would raise the minimum wage to $8.25 and guarantee future cost-of-living increases.
The Massachusetts AFL-CIO, which represents 400,000 workers in the state, is set to meet today to determine endorsements for the 2006 elections. Haynes said in his letter that the union would ``strongly consider postponing any endorsements of incumbent legislators" if the House had not passed the favored version by the time members convened at 10 a.m.
``We're basically asking the Legislature to give each low-wage worker the raise they've been waiting for for 5 1/2 years," said Tim Sullivan, public affairs coordinator for the state AFL-CIO.
The proposal includes a halt to indexing after 2009, so legislators could vote on future increases, ``a fair compromise to those that did not want to put the minimum wage on auto pilot," the letter says.
Some House lawmakers said the letter from state AFL-CIO surprised them because they thought the labor group had come to an agreement with the House leadership.
Representative Harriett Stanley said Haynes's letter would probably be counterproductive because ``most legislators don't take to that kind of posturing."
Said Representative Michael Festa: ``The language was pretty plain and frank, but I didn't take any offense. It was a direct and serious missive, and it got my attention. But I didn't feel threatened."
House members are taking the letter seriously, Festa said.
Massachusetts is already significantly above the national minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, but the state's minimum wage has not increased since 2001. Under the Senate bill, the minimum wage would jump to $7.50 on Sept. 1 and to $8.25 on Sept. 1, 2007. After that, the minimum wage would increase automatically every Sept. 1 to reflect any rise in the urban consumer price index, a measure of inflation in cities across the United States.
While some small business owners oppose legislation that ties the minimum wage to the rise in living costs, state workers and some legislators rallied on Beacon Hill yesterday in support of raising minimum wage to $8.25 with the indexing.
With chants of ``a buck is not enough," directed at the House proposal to raise the minimum wage $1, more than 50 advocates gathered at the State House, hoping to persuade House lawmakers to pass a minimum wage bill closer to the Senate's version.
``We're back here today to do what we didn't do in 1999, which is to win the highest minimum wage in America and index it, so it stays the highest minimum wage in America," said Harris Gruman, executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor.
Maureen Brennan, 44, a customer service representative from Worcester, stood in the crowd and cheered with the group. She said that her children have grown and gone and that her husband died three years ago with lung cancer. With increases in the cost of living, she said, she has trouble getting by.
``I can never pay my bills on time," she said. ``If I go out to eat, thank God for the dollar menu at
Some business owners, meanwhile, said the state should not increase the minimum wage.
Ralph Wilbur, who owns a printing company in Lawrence with 17 employees, said that raising the minimum wage would limit the amount of money that employers can put back into the business for such things as upgrades in equipment.
``They're going to hurt the industry as a whole in Massachusetts," he said.
