Minimum wage ballot questions looms amid haggling over process
Agreeing on general principles if not procedure, House Speaker Robert DeLeo said Monday the House’s approach to passing a minimum wage bill was “probably the only” way to move the legislation with the Senate.
The Senate passed a minimum wage increase bill in November and an unemployment insurance bill in February. The House on Wednesday plans to use a different bill to pass similar legislation that would include both the unemployment insurance reforms and a minimum wage increase.
If the Senate, in turn, takes up the House’s bill, according to Senate President Therese Murray, it would have to pass unemployment insurance and minimum wage legislation all over again, which Murray says could lead to weeks of delays given the Senate’s tolerance of procedural motions.
There is a Plan B, but it only applies to the minimum wage. If lawmakers for any reason can’t get a minimum wage bill through, activists are on pace to place before voters in November a question that would raise the wage from $8 to $10.50 an hour and tie it to inflation.
After a roughly hour-long meeting Monday afternoon in Gov. Deval Patrick’s office, Murray walked away from a cluster of reporters while DeLeo took questions, explaining why the House insists on passing its own bill rather than taking up the Senate’s version.
“Because of the procedural process that we have just gone through, actually this came to be probably the only vehicle that we were going to have in order to move this vehicle – to move this bill out of committee, and it was always my statement and my feeling that again these two bills should be combined and that is the reason for us to do so,” DeLeo said. “It’s always been my feeling that this piece of legislation or any other piece of legislation must go through the committee process and that’s what this bill did, go through the committee process.”
DeLeo has publicly supported increasing the minimum wage to $10.50, and the Senate bill approved last year would raise it to $11.
(Image credit: freedigitalphotos.net)
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