Disputes may sink minimum wage hike bills in Legislature
With only days left in the 2019 legislative session, the struggle between the Senate and the House of Representatives over how to reset New Mexico’s minimum wage law continued Tuesday when a House committee clashed with a senator over competing proposals.
And while the differences may be minimal to some — an extra dollar an hour in the House bill or a lower minimum wage for high school students in the Senate bill, for example — Sen. Clemente Sanchez, D-Grants, said if the two sides continue to butt heads on the matter, the state’s lowest-paid workers will suffer.
“I do not want to get to the point where we cannot work something out and we have no minimum wage [increase],” Sanchez told members of the House Labor, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee. “That’s more of a tragedy than either one of these bills not passing.”
But the five members of the committee present for the hearing on Sanchez’s Senate Bill 437 were unmoved, voting 5-0 to attach what he considered an “unfriendly amendment” to his bill and thus putting it more in alignment with a House bill working its way through the Senate.
Read more: https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/legislature/disputes-may-sink-minimum-wage-hike-bills-in-legislature/article_909c47c1-43f9-528c-b9ae-b8e445855623.html