Monday morning musings for workplace watchers.
Senior Public Workers Squeezed | Blunting Minimum Wage Raises
Courtney Rozen: Tucked into President
Trump is exerting more power than his predecessors over the senior executive service, the high-level managers that work just below the president’s appointees in nearly every federal agency.
The president said the constitution gives him the power to fire them and appoint loyalists to lead the boards that vet candidates for the senior executive service.
“The president must be able to trust that the executive service will work together in service of the nation,” Trump’s directive on the senior executive service said.
Within the SES are the chief medical officers, human capital directors, and chief information officers that oversee critical agency functions, among other jobs. Forcing them out will make it harder for Trump to carry out his campaign promises across departments, the Senior Executives Association said.
“SEA strongly recommends that new administration leaders work with, rather than against, experienced career agency executives to achieve this goal,” the group said in a statement.
The next date to watch is in mid-February. Trump directed his personnel and budget offices to write performance plans for these executives by that date.
Chris Marr: Republican state lawmakers want to roll back upcoming minimum wage and paid sick leave expansions approved by ballot measure before they take effect, potentially softening the blow to businesses and reversing gains by worker advocates.
The fight over wage and sick leave laws has been especially heated in Michigan, where Republican legislators boycotted the end of a lame-duck session in December as Democratic leadership declined to bring the issues to a vote. If legislators don’t agree on revisions, expansions of Michigan’s wage and sick time laws will take effect Feb. 21 under a court order from last July that resolved a years-long dispute over a 2018 ballot measure.
Republicans now control the Michigan House and passed proposals (HB 4001 and HB 4002) to satisfy restaurant industry and small business concerns about the court-ordered changes, with support from some House Democrats.
The GOP proposals face an uncertain future in the Democratic-majority Senate and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) office. The bills would eliminate the phase-out of the tip credit that lets restaurants pay servers less than the standard minimum wage if the workers make up the difference via tips. They would also exempt businesses with fewer than 50 employees from the requirement to provide employees with paid sick time.
Whitmer’s office wouldn’t say whether she supports the bills. She’s monitoring the legislation, spokesperson Stacey LaRouche said via email.
Citizen-led proposals to increase the minimum wage have a strong track record of passing, even in states with Republican-majority legislatures that tend to oppose such mandates, and advocates for paid sick leave laws are beginning to piggyback off that success. Voters in Alaska, Missouri, and Nebraska approved ballot questions in November with varying combinations of minimum wage and sick leave requirements.
But like the Michigan House, the GOP-majority legislatures in Missouri and Nebraska are considering bills that would delay or roll back those voter-approved measures.
In Missouri, HB 567 would delay new paid sick leave requirements to Jan. 1, 2026, instead of May 2025. Another (HB 555) would delay the state’s minimum wage increase to $15 an hour until 2028, instead of 2026. The minimum today is $13.75.
Nebraska’s LB 698 would amend the sick leave law that voters passed in November to exempt employers with 10 or fewer employees and reserve enforcement to the state Department of Labor, eliminating workers’ right to sue over violations.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is looking to rein in citizen-led ballot measures in other ways. Voters there in 2020 approved raising the minimum wage to $15, and last year narrowly missed the 60% thresholds needed to protect abortion rights and legalize marijuana.
The governor’s proposals for this legislative session include preventing advocacy groups from collecting petition signatures to qualify a proposal for the ballot, instead requiring that citizens fill out a petition form to submit directly to the state.
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