Progressives Ponder How Much To Bend

State Rep. Josh Elliott had a question for the crowd of progressive activists: Would they rather see legislators stand their ground on a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and risk no movement on minimum wage should it fail? Or should legislators support a compromise bill to raise the wage incrementally to, say, $11.25?

The crowd of more than 70 people who showed up at East Rock’s mActivity Monday night for a forum hosted by the local arm of the progressive Action Together Connecticut overwhelmingly favored some advancement on minimum wage. Something was better than nothing, they said. Take whatever money you can get now and run. Live to fight for $15 another session.

“Wow. I disagree with all of you,” Elliott, a freshman legislator from Hamden, said when he saw the hands, drawing a chuckle from attendees. ​“In my personal opinion, we’ll be fighting this every single year. And that is my frustration. I think [the minimum wage] needs to be $15. We’re coming back every year and never solving the problem.”

The Senate version of a bill introduced this session, to raise the current $10.10 hourly minimum wage to $15 by 2022, died in committee but an identical House version is still alive.

The forum was held to address the dire straits of the state’s budget, which faces a projected $5 billion two-year deficit. But the discussion centered mostly around the changing power dynamics between the Democrats and Republicans and what that means for the budget and progressive legislation.

State Sen. Gary Winfield, who participated in Monday’s forum with Elliott and State Reps. Robyn Porter, Sean Scanlon, James Albis and Mike D’Agostino, laid out some sobering historical context about why Democrats in the General Assembly have taken the something over nothing approach: They’re losing power every election. House Democrats currently hold a four-vote margin over House Republicans, while the state Senate is now tied 18 – 18.

Whether it’s an unpopular budget, raising the minimum wage, pay equity for women in the state or toll roads, lawmakers said Monday night that the new reality is that progressive Democrats are thwarted by not just the growing power of Republicans in the legislature but by their more moderate and conservative fellow Democrats.

Winfield said Democrats don’t have the luxury of dying on the hill for no progress on minimum wage if the current election trends continue. It’s a strategy on which Winfield and Elliott respectfully disagree.

“If I were on the side that didn’t want to raise the minimum wage at all, I would fight like hell so that all I needed to do was wait for the next election,” Winfield said. ​“If you walk out on the next two years and you are where we are right now, and the elections are happening the way they’ve been happening, you’re stuck where you are.”

Elliott is the former president of the Society for Dispute Resolution, where he focused on negotiation, arbitration, and mediation. He said after the forum that moderate Democrats and Republicans continue to dig their heels in the sand by just saying no to new revenue, no to a good pay equity bill and no to a significant raise in the minimum wage.

“We negotiate against ourselves when we constantly come down from where we are asking,” he said. ​“One of the reasons progressives are constantly on the losing end of legislation is because we give, give, give. Knowing that if we don’t, then people will suffer, and something is better than nothing.”

Elliott said that strategy of giving in has conditioned people who disagree with the progressive position to simply resist that position and force negotiations. He said he might support an incremental raising of the minimum wage if he were somehow the deciding vote, but generally, he believes it is a huge strategical error to negotiate away from what Democrats really want.

“I say we do what’s right, or if we really want $15, then we start at $20,” he said. ​“But we can’t start at where we want and keep on negotiating against ourselves. It’s embarrassing.”

Whether or not the lawmakers will be in the mood to raise the minimum wage to $15 or at all is still up in the air, according to State Rep. Robyn Porter, who chairs the legislature’s Labor and Public Employees Committee.

“With the new paradigm at the statehouse, it may be $15, it may be $13,” she said. ​“We don’t know if we can nail it at $15 because of the negotiations that are always going on. We’re starting at $15, I wish we’d asked for $20, then maybe I could say $15 is possible.”

She said raising the minimum wage to $15, while not enough, helps the revenues of the state. And those revenues need help. State income tax collections fell $450 million below levels anticipated for April, meaning that the state will have a two-year budget deficit of about $5 billion.

“The more people make, the more money they spend,” Porter said. ​“And that’s what we need. We need disposable income. Rich people don’t spend disposable income. They invest their money. So, we really do need to be putting money into the hands of middle-class and working families who actually support communities.”

Porter said critics of the state’s budget woes often say the state has a spending problem, but she disagrees.
​“We have a revenue problem,” she said. ​“And we have a problem paying our bills. You can’t pay bills unless you have money. So, it brings us back to revenue. My hope is that we go past $15, but I can’t commit or say confidently that it will be $15 when we’re done negotiating.”

The Politics Of Fear

The minimum wage bill is a window into many of the bills that are tied to the fate of the budget, particularly those bills that would generate revenue for the state and fill the yawning chasm that is the state’s budget deficit.

Whether it is the legalization of marijuana, the electronic tolling of state roads or taxing the state’s highest income earners, passing legislation and ultimately a budget hinges at the very least on keeping Democrats in the fold on key votes. And that’s been increasingly hard to do as the margin of power has gotten ever smaller, Winfield said, and people have become more fearful of losing their seats over controversial legislation.

When asked why the legislature couldn’t get a bill to legalize marijuana passed, Winfield said it comes down to fear.

“A lot of people don’t want to have their fingerprints on passing marijuana legalization in the state of Connecticut,” he said. Nevermind that surrounding states are looking at legalization and will reap the financial benefits of taking steps to make marijuana legal, he said. Revenue projections suggest that legalization could yield as much as $60 million for the state.

“But reefer madness has taken hold,” Winfield said. ​“There are people who don’t want to go into an election next year and say they voted to legalize marijuana. It’s the fear thing. It happens over and over again and it’s frustrating.”

He said it matters that people are willing to come to Hartford and testify to what the perceived ills and dangers of legalizing marijuana whether for children and adults.

“When that happens in a building like the state legislature where people are very afraid of what the public thinks — though 60-plus percent of people in Connecticut think we should legalize it — that doesn’t matter anymore,” he said.

That fear infects the debate about a pay equity bill, which was gutted in the House to make it more palatable for Republicans and more conservative, pro-business Democrats by removing inquiries into a prospective employee’s salary history.

Porter said when the legislation made it out of the House without that key provision, she was sick about it. But she said the reality is that type of compromise is the price of doing business at the Capitol. Ultimately, she said, it was very much like the minimum wage debate: take something or risk getting nothing.

“I came close to not doing the bill,” she said. ​“But it’s not about me. It’s about everybody in the state — it’s about the women in the state. I believe you take the biggest bite you can get and that was the biggest bite we could get, to get it out of the House.”

Winfield, who said he was disgusted when he learned that the bill had been watered down, told the crowd that the Senate is going to try for a second, bigger bite of the pay equity apple.

“I’m not sure what the watered-down version of this bill does,” he said. ​“So, we’re not doing the watered-down version. We’re doing the bill as it should be because there’s no point in the watered-down version. Who is afraid of doing what we say we do anyway? We’re saying we’re not doing anything to discriminate against women, but [then people say] ​‘I don’t want to do the bill.’ We’re going to fix that bill, and if the House doesn’t want to do it, let it be on them.

“Sometimes you have to say the bill needs to be done a certain way,” Winfield added. ​“And it might make people a little uncomfortable, but you have to do that.”

The 2017 Agenda