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Garrett Martin is the president and CEO of the Maine Center for Economic Policy.
Elected leaders in Maine strengthen our communities and address economic challenges through legislation. The major challenge facing Maine’s economy is the state’s plateauing workforce and to solve it we need to increase the workforce by boosting wages, improving workplace conditions, removing barriers like access to care for children and older Mainers, and bolstering tools and opportunities like higher education.
But following the 131st legislative session, many vital workers whose efforts contribute to our health, wellbeing and nourishment continue to be overlooked and underpaid, and tools and opportunities left unfunded.
MECEP’s conversations with workers in recent years have consistently illustrated the urgent need for addressing pay gaps in public service and the chronic undervaluing of essential work. Paying barely more than minimum wage to the highly skilled people who care for and educate our children, our parents and our loved ones with disabilities is a sad statement on how little value we put on that work. Furthermore, it perpetuates a legacy of gender-based wage discrepancies. It also puts Mainers who rely on those services at risk and has multiplying impacts throughout our economy.
While the recently passed supplemental budget includes a provision to ensure education support workers are paid more than the statewide minimum wage, it is less than the Joint Standing Committee on Education and Cultural Affairs recommended. The Legislature also failed to adopt the Education Committee’s recommendation for an increase in the minimum salary for teachers. Similarly, although the investments lawmakers have made through the supplemental budget in nursing homes and the people who work there are significant, it falls short in addressing the widening gap between the care older and disabled Mainers need and what is available.
Maine state employees deliver many services Mainers depend on, from child protection to public health nursing and the management of programs that support people experiencing financial instability. A report released by the Maine Department of Administrative and Financial Services and MECEP’s own analysis reveal a persistent pay gap between state workers and those in similar private sector and other public-sector jobs, resulting in a nearly 16 percent job vacancy rate in state government.
Lawmakers failed to advance efforts to expand the state’s recruitment and retention payment system to address this pay gap in the supplemental budget. And a proposal to redirect taxes on higher earning retirees to help fund cost-of-living adjustment increases for retired public workers ultimately failed even though it was passed by the Taxation Committee.
And what of the people who milk our cows and harvest our food? Gov. Janet Mills vetoed bills that would have created a farmworker minimum wage and protected farmworkers’ rights to concerted activity. These essential workers remain without a right to be paid the minimum wage, receive a pay stub or address their needs at work without being exposed to discipline, a right granted to nearly every other private-sector worker.
For these and other policy solutions that require ongoing funding, there are many ways the Legislature can increase revenues to meet the moment. To start, let’s ensure wealthy people and corporations are paying their fair share by creating high income tax brackets that roll back the harmful LePage tax cuts, ending wasteful corporate tax breaks and closing off loopholes massive corporations use to hide their income. Lawmakers should also revisit whether dedicating general fund dollars from sales tax revenue is the best way to close the highway fund’s structural shortfall created by the 2011 fuel tax freeze.
Next session, legislators should take a fresh look at these and other revenue raising ideas so we can do even better for Maine workers, families and communities.
