Legislators have tried for years to raise Vermont’s minimum wage to $15 an hour. A more modest increase went into effect Jan. 1, upping it from $11.75 to $12.55, but even that required the Legislature to override Gov. Phil Scott’s veto back in 2020.
We might see a sequel to that fight this year with S.52, a bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025.
But given the dramatic rise in inflation over the past year and the effect workforce shortages have had on the labor market, lawmakers wondered Thursday whether they ought to try to raise the floor sooner.
“Even this draft bill is a little out of date, given where we are, where the labor market is,” Sen. Michael Sirotkin, D-Chittenden, said Thursday in a meeting of the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Housing and General Affairs. Members of the committee he chairs seemed to be in agreement that they’d need new data on current wages.
The committee also discussed universal paid family leave, as proposed in S.65, harkening back to a similarly intense fight two years ago. (The House fell just one vote short of overriding Scott’s veto at the time.)
Though minimum wage and paid family leave were hot issues in previous biennia, they seem to have dropped off the radar recently: Both bills were sent to committee last session and didn’t make it off the wall.
With President Joe Biden’s paid leave proposal in purgatory, maybe this year it’ll draw renewed attention?
It is an election year, after all.
— Riley...
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