ALEC « Washington Policy Watch

January 23, 2012 • 9:01 am 0

Washington state voters were ahead of the curve on minimum wage – why can’t these legislators catch up?

When Washington voters overwhelmingly passed an initiative to index the state’s minimum wage to inflation back in 1998, naysayers made “doom and gloom” predictions that turned out to be more Chicken Little than anything else.

Nine other states (AZ, CO, FL, MO, MT, NV, OH, OR, VT) followed suit, and more recently, some (at first blush) surprising advocates for stronger minimum wage laws have emerged. Among them: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Independent), who advocate indexing the federal minimum wage to inflation and increasing the minimum wage, respectively. (President Obama previously endorsed raising the federal minimum wage to $9.50, then indexing it based on the Consumer Price Index.)

Given that context, it’s more than a little surprising to see a group of Washington legislators file three different bills this year, each aimed at undercutting Washington state’s best-in-the-nation minimum wage in some fashion: Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: minimum wage, ALEC, michael bloomberg, Minimum wage, mitt romney, obama, public policy, washington state

November 23, 2011 • 8:55 am 1

Flu with those fries? ALEC pushes for repeal of paid sick days

Will ALEC bring Cyrus the Virus back to Seattle? (photo: Seattle Coalition for a Healthy Workforce)

From PR Watch:

Will Philadelphia‘s and Seattle‘s new paid sick leave ordinances be overridden by their states? Or will the states back them up, as Connecticut has? If the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has any say in the matter, Pennsylvania and Washington State should override the city ordinances as Wisconsin has done.

ALEC is the corporate-funded bill mill where right-wing legislators and corporate members craft, then vote to approve, “model legislation” that mostly benefits the corporate bottom line. ALEC’s 2011 Annual Meeting was held in New Orleans in August.

According to materials obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy, paid sick leave was a hot topic on this year’s agenda of corporations and their allied politicians. “Paid family medical leave” was the only topic of discussion by the Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee of the Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force, according to the meeting minutes.

Meeting attendees were given complete copies of Wisconsin’s 2011 Senate Bill 23 (now Wisconsin Act 16), as a model for state override. They were also handed a target list and map of state and local paid sick leave policies prepared by ALEC member, the National Restaurant Association. In Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Restaurant Association lobbied for SB 23 to repeal the sick leave ordinance, as did the the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC), the local branch of the the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an ALEC member. The effect of the repeal will be more sick workers at work, making others ill, in order to save or increase profits by corporations.

Not surprisingly, ALEC’s Labor and Business Regulation Subcommittee is co-chaired by YUM! Brands, Inc., which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Fast food companies have fought paid sick leave across the country.

Get the full story from PR Watch »

Filed under: paid sick days, work and family, ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council, Center for Media and Democracy, National Restaurant Association, paid sick days, paid sick leave, philadelphia, Seattle, wisconsin, Yum! Brands

Washington Policy Watch

Washington state voters were ahead of the curve on minimum wage – why can’t these legislators catch up?

Flu with those fries? ALEC pushes for repeal of paid sick days

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