The second session of the 132nd legislature included the passage of several laws that will improve working conditions for Mainers and make it easier to get access to care for children, older adults, and Mainers with disabilities.
Wins for workers
Beginning July 27, most employers in Maine will need to include a pay range with job postings and keep a record of that pay range they can show existing employees in that same position. This aligns Maine with several other states with similar provisions and will empower workers to bargain for better wages while making it harder for employers to discriminate against groups like women or people of color. LD 54 passed last year but only received the funding needed by the Department of Labor to enforce it this year.
The Governor also signed a bill, LD 522, that directs the Permanent Commission on the Status of Women to study workforce gender segregation. This should help identify barriers to entry in industries like construction, engineering, and transportation, that perpetuate lower wages for women. The legislature did not fund a bill, LD 799, that would have required the state’s largest corporations to publicly disclose gender wage gaps.
Care economy
The legislature and governor continued their recent efforts to make child care more affordable while ensuring child care workers earn a decent living. The supplemental budget includes funding to allow approximately 1,700 more children to participate in the state’s Child Care Affordability Program that helps families with low and middle income afford care, which includes clearing the current waitlist and opening new spots.
The legislature also included money in the supplemental budget to fund a one-time cost-of-living allowance increase to the reimbursement rates in MaineCare for certain kinds of care workers. While welcome for care workers, this increase fell short of the proposals in LD 1932, which would have increased those rates from the current 125% to 140% of the statewide minimum wage to better reflect the value of those jobs. The supplemental budget did include a provision of LD 1932 for the Maine Health Data Organization to calculate the gap between the demand for care services and what’s currently available, and the cost to bridge that gap.
Governor’s veto hurts workers with criminal records
Governor Mills vetoed LD 1911, a “clean slate” bill that would have automatically sealed low-level criminal records after five years if the person in question had no further criminal activity. This could have helped 123,000 Mainers have better access to jobs, housing, and education by removing the records of past mistakes that do not reflect their professional ability. An attempt to override the governor’s veto failed.
Unaddressed needs
The legislature once again passed but declined to fund LD 599, a bill that would increase eligibility for overtime pay for low-paid salaried workers. The legislature first considered this issue in 2019. The major piece of funding required to implement this legislation was $2 million a year to pay state workers who would be newly eligible for overtime pay.
The legislature also ignored the needs of state workers by failing to reverse its decision last year to effectively take $68 million from the salary plan fund for state workers to balance the rest of the budget. This has contributed to the current stalemate between state worker unions and the Mills administration in contract negotiations, with the administration saying it is unable to offer wage increases to close the gap between state worker wages and their private-sector equivalents.