Less than 24 hours after the General Assembly adjourned May 7, the Connecticut Business & Industry Association issued an alert to its members about “troubling trends” in the legislature.
The state’s largest business advocacy group said a growing anti-business — read pro-labor — tone at the Capitol risks disabling the very companies that produce the profits and jobs generating the tax revenues that fuel state government.
Looking at a scorecard of legislation that passed and failed, the CBIA didn’t have all that bad a year. But they were alarmed.
On the final night of the session, CBIA said, a distressingly high number of dangerously anti-business bills originating in the Labor Committee were waiting to be called. Most died. Even so, keeping those bills alive until the very last minute seemed to send a message that Connecticut is unfriendly to business development.
One source of the CBIA’s anxiety is the impending change in House leadership in the wake of Speaker Jim Amman’s announcement that he will resign in January to run for governor. His presumed successor, House Majority Leader Chris Donovan, is seen as leaning toward the interests of the public sector unions. In the other chamber, Senate President Pro Tem Don Williams has railed against proposed tax cuts, including the obnoxious $250 annual business entity tax, with unrestrained populism.
The CBIA is also concerned about the pro-labor tilt of rank-and-file legislators, who have a personal stake in enhancing the power of the public sector unions because they fight for legislators’ own gold-plated benefit and retirement packages. (If you have to collect a $250 annual business entity tax from a struggling entrepreneur to help fund the ridiculously low government employee health co-payments, so be it.)
The CBIA worries that the legislative leadership is growing tone deaf to business interests, and that the state may pay a steep price in the competition to retain and recruit major employers and to encourage entrepreneurs.
Three high-profile bills purported to help small business were actually opposed by the business community. One would have expanded mandatory paid sick leave. Another would have created state-managed retirement plans for small business. A third would allow small businesses and municipalities to join in the state’s gold-plated health care plan.
The sick leave and retirement bills died. The health care bill, which was pushed by the public labor union advocates, awaits the governor’s signature.
Labor advocates counter that CBIA is a narrowly focused lobbying arm for the titans of private industry. They point out that CBIA runs its own health plan, which it markets to its corporate members. That represents a vested interest in opposition to the health care bill, which would set up new competition to the CBIA’s in-house plan.
And the CBIA opposed an overdue increase in the state’s minimum wage even as the state was getting slammed in an editorial in The New York Times for having the widest gap between the rich and the poor of any state in the nation.
Both are legitimate points. But there’s a bigger picture. The pro-labor leadership emerging in the General Assembly does appear to be in denial about the facts in the competitive world. As they focus narrowly on their own perks and power, they seem oblivious to the interests of the folks who actually pay the state’s bills: corporations and their employees. The CBIA is underscoring the fact that employers are increasingly mobile. Labor would do well to begin factoring that in to their policy making.
