Missouri Democrats stonewalled a Republican effort to roll back a voter-approved paid sick leave law, blocking action in the Senate for more than nine hours before GOP leadership adjourned the chamber around 1 a.m. Thursday.
A bill sponsored by state Sen. Mike Bernskoetter, a Republican from Jefferson City, would gut Proposition A, a voter-approved law requiring most employers to provide paid sick time off for hundreds of thousands of qualifying workers starting May 1.
Bernskoetter said Proposition A “creates a one-size-fits-all” solution that would hurt businesses.
“An agreement to exchange time and talent for wages and other benefits is a contract between employee and employer, so I don’t really think we should be getting in the middle of that,” Bernskoetter said, adding that voters may not have understood the extent of the law from the ballot summary.
The bill passed out of the House last month on a vote of 96 to 51. If the Senate approves the bill, it will head to the governor’s desk.
The bill would also modify the minimum wage law by removing the requirement that it be indexed to inflation.
Democrats began filibustering the bill shortly after Berskoetter brought it to the floor Wednesday, just before 4 p.m.
Senate Democratic Leader Doug Beck of Affton has called the issue of overturning Prop A a “red line.”
“When I say I stand up for working families and workers, I take that seriously,” Beck said.
Beck said he and Republican leadership worked on a compromise dealing with “some details of implementation” that was then upended.
“I’m going to continue those negotiations, and we’ll see what we can do, if we can come to some sort of conclusion. Maybe. Again, we might not,” Beck said when the filibuster began.
Bernskoetter told him: “There’s just a lot of businesses that are affected by this all over our state, and it’s just a cumbersome process. I’m sure we can come to some kind of a solution.”
Proposition A passed with over 57% of the vote in Missouri, including rural, suburban and urban counties.
As he began the Democratic filibuster Wednesday evening, Beck ticked through each Senate district’s vote totals, noting that it passed in 20 of the chamber’s 34 districts, including 11 represented by Republicans.
“This is literally a mandate,” Beck said, from the voters. “…The voters were never deceived.”
State Sen. Angela Mosley, a St. Louis Democrat, said the bill “will send a message back to their constituents that their public input doesn’t matter.”
The legislature should wait to see what the impact is before intervening, said Democratic state Sen. Steve Roberts of St. Louis.
“What was passed was reasonable, it’s fair and it’s what our constituents want,” he said.
State Sen. Tracy McCreery, an Olivette Democrat, said the legislature continues helping the wealthiest, including through the proposed capital gains tax cut the Senate passed last week.
“We’re doing a lot of things to help Missourians that are at the 1% of the 1%, or the people that are very, very fortunate. But then we’re just piling things on and just doing everything we can, it feels like we’re just kicking and going after regular working families…And you know, we’re doing things that just continue to just make it harder for people to make ends meet each and every month.”
State Sen. Rick Brattin, a Harrisonville Republican, said the passage of Prop A is evidence of the problems with Missouri’s initiative petition process, which he said puts major policy decisions in the hands of voters rather than the government they elected to represent them. It should’ve never gone to the people for a vote, he said.
“This is one of those things, of the problem with direct democracy,” Brattin said. “This is exactly what our founders were expressively against when they formed this nation.”
He said small businesses won’t be able to absorb the costs.
“The people casting the ballots for measures such as this, they have no skin in the game whatsoever, when it comes to these sorts of measures,” Brattin said. “No realization of the detriment, or the harm that it may cause to their very own bottom dollar, because they may not even understand what these measures would do to their employer.”
On Wednesday night, as GOP leadership adjourned the chamber because an agreement could not be reached, Senate Majority Leader Cindy O’Laughlin, a Republican from Shelbina, posted on social media that the debate is not over.
“We will set this aside for the moment but we are committed to getting it done before session ends,” she wrote. “This is a basic economic issue that we cannot let become permanently ensconced in our state. We will return to this in the next couple weeks. Stay tuned.”
Under the law, beginning May 1 employers with business receipts greater than $500,000 a year must provide at least one hour of paid leave for every 30 hours worked. Employers with fewer than 15 workers must allow workers to earn at least 40 hours per year, with larger employers mandated to allow at least 56 hours. The law also gradually increases the minimum wage.
The bill would allow the minimum wage to increase to $15 per hour in 2026, as voters approved, but it would not be adjusted for inflation thereafter — a policy that has been in place since 2007. The sick leave provisions would be repealed entirely.
Those provisions would make sick leave guaranteed for around 728,000 workers who currently lack it statewide, or over 1 in 3 Missouri workers, according to an analysis from the progressive nonprofit the Missouri Budget Project.
Business groups at last month’s hearing called the measure a “job killer.”
Buddy Lahl, from the Missouri Restaurant Association, called the requirements on businesses “extremely cumbersome” and said the law is a “slippery slope” for what businesses will be required to provide.
Richard Von Glahn, policy director for Missouri Jobs with Justice, the organization that helped lead the campaign for Proposition A, said it was modeled on paid sick leave policies in 18 other states.
“It will make Missouri workers more likely to have to go to work while sick, jeopardizing their own health, the health of their coworkers and of Missouri workplaces,” he said last month, of the legislation to overturn Prop A.
Many of the same industry groups who testified at hearings to challenge the law are also challenging Proposition A in the state Supreme Court. The court has not handed down a decision yet.
This story was originally published by the Missouri Independent.
