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Labor Committee Co-Chairs Kushner & Porter Stand in Support of Fair Work Week Scheduling Bill

Thousands of low-wage workers struggle to maintain stable income due to unpredictable work schedules 

HARTFORD — Labor and Public Employee Committee Co-Chairs Senator Julie Kushner (D-Danbury) and state Representative Robyn Porter (D- New Haven) today urged other state lawmakers to help them pass House Bill 5353, An Act Concerning a Fair Work Week Schedule,

The Fair Work Week bill will ensure that workers have access to a stable job that treats them and their families with respect by ensuring retail, food service and hospitality workers have their schedules set in advance, which allows for more predictable schedules and paychecks and gives part-time workers the opportunity to work more hours if they so choose.

“The pandemic has only increased the already high number of workers who work multiple jobs. Without fair work week legislation, it’s impossible for workers holding multiple jobs to manage their schedule in a way to keep working,” Sen. Kushner said. “Advanced notice of the schedule benefits both the employer and the workers in managing their schedule so they don’t have to call out because of last-minute changes. If we’re basing our economy and our recovery on part-time work, then we have to commit ourselves to making it work. That requires advanced notice, incentivizing workers who can pick up shifts and paying a nominal amount for workers who are called in and then sent home. It’s clear that work volume and weather conditions have an impact on an employer’s need for workers at any given time, but workers shouldn’t bear the entire cost of this; it should be shared with employers.”

“Two-thirds of Connecticut workers have unpredictable work schedules ,and most of them are women and Black and brown workers. Yet over seventy percent want a predictable work schedule,” Rep. Porter said. “Therefore, we continue to demand a fair work week schedule because it’s not just about a predictable schedule but a predictable paycheck. It is long overdue for Connecticut workers to have the sustainability that they need and deserve, and House Bill 5353 will provide them with the necessary tools to assist with things like housing and food security and help to level the playing field at its most vulnerable intersections for these undervalued low-wage workers.”

Sen. Kushner and Rep. Porter were joined by a variety of Fair Work Week Schedule supporters, including Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney (D-New Haven), Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff (D-Norwalk), Representatives Bob Godfrey (D-Danbury) and Gary Turco (D-Newington), and AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne, President, CT Women’s Education and Legal Fund Executive Director Janée Woods Weber, CT Working Families Party State Director Sarah Ganong, and Cristher Estrada, an impacted worker.

“I worked part-time at the Clinique counter at Macy’s while I was attending college full-time,” Estrada told reporters today as Sen. Kushner and Rep. Porter looked on. “I loved the work, but they made it so hard for me – last-minute schedule changes, they’d dock you points if you were even five minutes late, and one time I showed up for my shift and they told me it had been canceled and they didn’t want to pay me. Everyone deserves a good, steady job that pays a living wage and treats them with respect. Legislators must support the Fair Work Week bill.”

“All workers have a right to a good, stable job that pays a living wage and treats them respectfully. In Connecticut, hundreds of thousands of low wage hourly workers, many earning poverty wages, struggle to earn a stable income because of unpredictable work schedules,” Ganong said. “After several years, it is long past time for legislators to pass House Bill 5353 and ensure Connecticut workers have access to a stable job that respects them, their time, and their families, and gives them a path to prosperity.”

“If we are serious about creating more equity in our state and in our economy, then passing fair work week legislation is mandatory,” Woods Weber said. “Women and people of color are over-represented in jobs with unpredictable scheduling and low wages. If we don’t put basic protocols like fair and predictable scheduling into place, then as a state we cannot claim to value women in the workplace or people of color in the workplace. We need to pass this bill this session, without any more excuses that value business profits over people’s lives.”

Sen. Kushner and Senate Democrats Announce Worker Protection Initiatives for 2022

HARTFORD – Today, state Senator Julie Kushner (D-Danbury) and Senate Democratic Caucus leaders unveiled legislative proposals to expand worker protections in Connecticut, including fair scheduling, pandemic pay, expanding paid sick days to more employees, and other pro-employee measures.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has created a real employment reckoning in the United States and across the world. There is a new focus on wages and working conditions and the value of labor, and there is an increasing respect not only for ‘frontline’ workers – doctors and nurses – but also for ‘essential workers’ – restaurant employees and grocery store clerks and big box store workers and health care aides and package delivery employees and others,” said Sen. Kushner, who is senate Chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee. “With that new-found recognition of the value of their labor comes a new responsibility on the part of lawmakers to address the workplace issues that they are facing, and to ensure that their work is protected and valued. Lawmakers enabled CEOs and hedge fund managers to amass great wealth for many decades; now is the time for us to give equal consideration to the frontline employees who work hard every day to keep us safe and keep our economy going – especially under the hazardous conditions that we’ve all experienced over the past two years. That’s what these bills do.”

“Right now we are positioned to really put our money where our mouth is concerning our working class citizens, and I am excited, hopeful and willing to ensure we do just that,” said Senator Jorge Cabrera (D-Hamden), Senate Vice-Chair of the Labor  and Public Employees Committee. “We’ve all heard the praises for our courageous frontline workers, our grocery store employees, healthcare workers and teachers. It’s time we really reward them with pandemic pay. Furthermore, it’s time to truly address the inequities made worse by this pandemic that rest primarily on our working-class folks. Our state has a balanced budget, surpluses and a maxed-out Rainy Day fund. We can do this, and I will do my best to make sure we do this.”

Many Labor Committee bills this session could be thematically grouped under one heading: An Act Protecting Connecticut Workers. The 2022 proposals include:

• An Act Concerning Fair Work Week Schedule requires certain employers to provide advanced notice to certain employees of that employees’ work schedule.

• An Act Concerning Protection of Warehouse Workers requires warehouse operators to disclose their various work quotas and work speed metrics to employees and government agencies. It also bans so-called “time off task” penalties that affect the health and safety of employees. The California state legislature passed a similar bill last fall that gives Amazon and other warehouse workers new power to fight speed quotas, which critics say have forced workers to skip bathroom and rest breaks and skirt safety measures.

• An Act Concerning Expanding Workers’ Compensation Coverage for Post-Traumatic Stress Injuries for All Employees would extend existing post-traumatic stress injury workers’ compensation claims coverage – now available mostly to police, fire, corrections, EMS, and other first responders – to all employees for those admittedly rare instances where an employee witnesses or experiences a traumatic event that leads them to being diagnosed with a PTSI.

• An Act Concerning Expansion of Connecticut Paid Sick Days would expand the number of paid sick days that employees in Connecticut must receive, bringing us in line with other states. Connecticut state law already requires certain employers with 50 or more employees to provide 40 hours of paid sick leave per year to “service workers,” which is defined as an hourly, nonexempt employee engaged in a broad list of detailed occupation code numbers and titles. In Rhode Island, sick leave applies to employers with 18 or more employees. In Maine, it’s 10, and in New York, five.

• An Act Concerning Hero Pandemic Pay for Essential Workers would provide pandemic pay for Connecticut’s essential frontline workers.

• An Act Concerning Unemployment Overpayment seeks to address the 2020 state Labor Department overpayment of some unemployment benefits by creating a pathway to waive the repayment requirements for unemployment benefit recipients who were overpaid through no fault of their own.