BREAKING: Unexpected vote today. An amendment has been slipped onto an unrelated bill to delay the implementation of Earned Sick Leave by a year from July 1 of this year to July 1, 2016. Can you make a quick call to your state senator and ask them to vote against the amendment? Note that Mass voters approved this via ballot by 59.4% last year. Why the holdup?
This could be your #ONEBoston (do something nice) thing today. If you don’t know the name/number of your senator:
http://www.wheredoivotema.com/bal/MyElectionInfo.aspx It’s amendment #19 on S-44.
Thank you.
Please share widely!
Senator Michael Rodrigues of Westport, the sponsor of the amendment, just requested leave to withdraw it (probably because it was not sufficiently related to the subject matter of the bill.) Leave was granted.
And the result. Thank you.
Thanks for getting it on radar screen. I didn’t know.
As maggiemae probably knows, Senator Rodrigues has also filed a bill to change not just the effective date of the earned sick time law but other substantive provisions as well. Senate 1004.
would his bill change?
Senator Rodrigues bill to “clarify” the ballot initiative makes several substantive changes designed to undermine and weaken the earned sick time law approve by the voters. The big ones are:
1) Weakens employee protections through numerous new provisions that, for example, allow termination of employees who don’t follow all the new rules to the letter around requesting sick time, eliminate most of the bill’s treble damages provisions, deny the right to use sick time to care for a child over 18, and allow employers to deny the right to carryover sick time.
2) Impose costly new burdens on the Attorney General and the Labor Department. The provisions look like this: “There shall be a fiscal impact statement made by the state Office of the Attorney General regarding the costs associated with analyzing, promulgating, and educating Massachusetts businesses and individuals regarding the new law. The cost associated with this should also itemize the cost associated for businesses to analyze, operationalize and possible risk cost associated with legal cost associated with non-compliance.”
If you ask me, the legislature should be prohibited from changing ballot-approved laws for at least two years, if not forever.
…but it does seem that if we are going to allow the voters to make laws then the legislature elected on the same ballot as the question should not be allowed to play with the question. Once another election has intervened one could argue that voters sent different people and may therefore have different ideas.