- The Senate Labor and Commerce Committee on Monday approved a pair of contentious Republican-sponsored bills but deferred action on what promises to be an even more hotly debated measure.
By a 4-3, party-line vote, the committee approved a proposal that would prevent local governments – specifically SeaTac and Seattle – from approving minimum wages higher than the state standard and another that would extend the window of opportunity from 30 to 90 days for public-sector workers wanting to de-certify their current union representatives.
“This bill doesn’t do what we heard in testimony it would,” said Sen. Steve Conway (D-Tacoma) of the minimum wage measure, Senate Bill 6307. “This is all about pre-empting wage and benefit negotiations.”
Advocates for the bill say they’re all for giving city and county governments leeway in setting their own standards, but having one minimum wage in one place and a different rate for companies literally a few feet away can have adverse consequences for both.
For employers located outside cities like SeaTac and Seattle, which are considering raising the minimum wage from the statewide level of $9.32 an hour to $15, it could force them to pay the higher rate when their workers do contract jobs, perhaps just driving a delivery truck, in different zones. Meanwhile, employers inside the city with the higher minimum wage risk losing customers to competitors just a few blocks away whose prices aren’t inflated by higher labor costs.
“Some issues are just better dealt with at the state level by establishing one rule everyone can understand and follow,” said Sen. John Braun (R-Centralia), the bill’s prime sponsor. “If we care about poverty, we ought to be creating jobs, not making it harder for employers to hire people. Creating a crazy patchwork of regulations that change from one block to the next doesn’t create jobs. It destroys them.”
“I appreciate the bureaucratic problems,” said Sen. Bob Hasegawa (D-Seattle), like Conway a longtime labor union official before being elected to the Legislature, “but rather than dragging everybody down to the same level, I’d rather see us adopt the higher minimum wage statewide and raise everyone up to the higher level.”
“This is a basic primer in democracy,” Conway fumed, “and the right of duly elected local representatives to make critical decisions about wage standards and sick leave.
“I’m an emphatic no on this bill,” he said.
Conway was no less flummoxed on Senate Bill 6244, which would extend the time in which public employees could decertify their unions. Currently, workers have a year to circulate petitions to throw out the union. When they have signatures from at least 30 percent of the affected workers, they paperwork is submitted to the Public Employment Relations Commission, which can take up to 30 days to review it before authorizing a vote on the question.
According to Sen. Curtis King (R-Yakima), who authored the bill, PERC has been known to wait until literally the last minute to identify technical problems with how the paperwork was filled out, leaving no time to make corrections before the 30-day window closed.
SB-6244 would extend the deadline to 90 days, giving the agency more than enough time to do its work.
“I just don’t see what problem we’re trying to fix here,” Conway said. “We heard testimony from one person who couldn’t get it done before the deadline, but we’re talking about changing the law for everyone. To me, this is just about attacking public employee unions.”
Committee chair Sen. Janea Holmquist Newbry (R-Wenatchee) decided to wait until Wednesday to vote on SB-6300, which would hold public-sector unions to the same financial disclosure standards private-sector unions must meet.
The bill, which would require unions to show what percentage of union revenues were being spent for political activities rather than simply paying the costs of collective bargaining. The bill’s sponsors believe if more workers realized what they were really paying for, more would opt out of paying full dues and exercise their right to pay only a slightly lower “representation fee.”
The bill was hotly debated in committee last week and substitute language added afterwards. Holmquist Newbry agreed to postpone the vote to give Democrats on the committee an opportunity to discuss the change.
The technical deadline for moving most bills out of committee during this year’s abbreviated legislative session is Friday.
