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Lawmakers Water Down Labor Issues In Lame Duck

Michigan Capitol
Cheyna Roth
/
MPRN
Michigan capitol building in Lansing

The lame duck session is in full swing this week and lawmakers are pushing through controversial legislation on union release time as well as watering down measures regarding minimum wage and paid sick time.

Both the minimum wage and paid sick time measures were on their way to the November ballot, but the legislature adopted them in September so they could change the measures before they became law.

Now lawmakers want to delay increasing the minimum wage to $12 an hour to at least 2030, instead of 2022, among other things.

Lawmakers would scale back the sick time measure by reducing the total number of hours of paid sick time an employer would have to offer. It would also require workers to put in more hours to earn time off and exempt certain employees.

Capital Correspondent Cheyna Roth says many people didn’t realize that lawmakers could do this to what were supposed to be ballot initiatives. Roth says Republicans in favor of the changes argue, “this is all a part of our democratic process, there’s nothing in the constitution that says we can’t do this.”

Yet that undermines the hundreds of thousands of people who voted for these ballot initiatives. Roth says these moves by the legislature could ultimately turn people away from trying to start ballot measures in the future.

“This could potentially mean that going forward that people stay away from these citizen-led ballot petitions and go straight for constitutional amendments which lawmakers do not have a chance to vote on,” Roth says.

Lawmakers also pushed through surprise legislation this week to ban certain public employers from paying employees while they conduct union business.

All these fast moving labor related bills moving forward in the lame duck session seem to mirror what happened six years ago. That’s when lawmakers pushed the controversial right to work bill into law in the final moments of the lame duck session in 2012. But Roth says these Hail Mary passes are the ‘same old, same old.’

“Lame duck is always the time of year when lawmakers who have an agenda and are leaving want to get their items done and in this case we have a Democratic governor coming up,” Roth says.

Before becoming the newest Capitol reporter for Michigan Public Radio Network, Cheyna Roth was an attorney. She spent her days fighting it out in court as an assistant prosecuting attorney for Ionia County.
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