By Eric Francis, Standard Correspondent
A bill that would increase Vermont’s hourly minimum wage from its current rate of $10.50 up to $15 an hour by the year 2024 was approved last week by the Vermont Senate but it faces an uncertain future in the House.
Although Governor Phil Scott has made it clear he opposes the bill, proponents of raising the minimum wage are holding out hope that if the House does eventually pass it they can still get it to become law this legislative session.
That’s because last Friday’s 20-to-10 vote which got the bill through the Senate is equal to the exact number of senators who would be needed to form a two-thirds majority in order to override the governor’s threatened veto.
Senator Alison Clarkson (D-Windsor County) of Woodstock was a strong supporter of the minimum wage increase, saying she would have liked to have seen it phased in even sooner than the sixyear timetable currently called for in the bill.
“These are not high school kids,” Clarkson said of the state’s pool of minimum wage laborers, “A huge percentage of them are women with young children,” working in industries like home health care and tourism hospitality.
Clarkson said that politicians like to talk about “the need for strong families” when discussing societal ills such as the opioid crisis gripping the region but, she wondered, “How do you maintain and afford a strong family life when people are working two and three jobs?”
Clarkson also noted that while Windsor County has the second highest housing costs in the state behind Chittenden County and a high cost of living, it doesn’t have the high number of minimum wage jobs that other regions in Vermont do; however, she said Windsor County’s taxpayers still end up chipping in financially to make up the difference for low wage earners in other parts of the state through various forms of public assistance.
The debate over whether to have a minimum wage often comes down to a chicken-and-egg conundrum as to which prospect might be worse for entry-level job seekers: the prospect of no job at all or of having one that still doesn’t pay the bills.
“I think the two biggest issues we face are poverty and trauma,” Clarkson said this past week, “My colleagues are always saying, ‘Don’t give people a handout – Give them a hand up.’ Well, this is a hand up,” Clarkson argued.
Representative Jim Harrison (R-Bridgewater, Killington, Chittenden and Mendon) said he plans to oppose the bill when it reaches the House.
“I think we all want higher wages but it’s a matter of whether an edict from Montpelier is the best way to do it,” Harrison said.
“When you just pass a law and say you are going to pay $15 an hour there could be some unintended consequences, not the least of which is lost jobs and lost hires which hurts the people you are trying to help, not to mention what it does to taxpayers and rate payers on everything from the cost of education and health care to the prices of products in your local store,” Harrison continued.
Pointing to neighboring New Hampshire, which just has the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Harrison noted that the average wage there, especially in the southern part of the state, is higher than in Vermont.
“I think that says a lot about the economic climate,” Harrison said. “I think we need to address some of our overall economic issues and do whatever we can to make Vermont more attractive to business. That would help everybody…and would hopefully lead to higher wages.”
This article originally ran in the Feb. 22, 2018, edition of the Vermont Standard.