NOLA.com: Minimum wage increase, ban on LGBTQ job discrimination killed in Louisiana House
By JAMES FINN | Staff writer | May 3, 2023
Republicans on a Louisiana House labor committee killed a pair of bills Wednesday that would have raised the state's minimum wage and barred bosses from discriminating against workers on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.
The hearing mirrored other contentious meetings in the current legislative session, where tensions have flared between lawmakers and residents over controversial bills, mostly affecting rights of LGBTQ+ people.
The House Committee on Labor and Industrial Relations considered the minimum wage bill and the workplace discrimination ban on Wednesday, and hearings on both bills grew tense. At one point, staffers removed Melissa Flournoy, a progressive advocate and former lawmaker, from the room after she refused to stop speaking in support of the minimum wage increases.
"They can arrest me, that’s fine," Flournoy said, moments before she left.
The minimum wage hike, House Bill 374, is routinely proposed and has repeatedly failed in the legislature in the face of opposition from major business groups.
Sponsored by Rep. Ed Larvadain, D-Alexandria, this year's measure proposed setting a state minimum wage of $10 per hour in 2024, which would then increase by $2 in 2026 and by another $2 in 2028. Louisiana businesses currently only rely on the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour; opponents of the change argued it would force layoffs.
Though the bill has been brought and failed before, inflation has worsened and hit workers hard, raising the measure's importance, Louisiana Budget Project Director Jan Moller told the panel. Given those factors, he said the bill's proposal didn't go far enough.
"We aren't talking about a livable wage," Moller said. "(The bill's proposal) is way below a livable wage."
This year's hearing on the minimum wage measure seemed particularly heated, with lawmakers and public speakers challenging one another even after Flournoy's removal from the committee room.
State Rep. Dodie Horton, R-Haughton, at one point chided a speaker, Peter Robins-Brown of Louisiana Progress Action, after Robins-Brown suggested that some lawmakers weren't familiar with the struggles of living on low wages.
"You don't know how we were raised, what income we were raised with... Just because we have a different philosophy doesn't mean that we don't know, and that we don't understand hard work," Horton said.
Larvadain's bill died on a 9-5 vote, with Democrats supporting it and Republicans in opposition. The vote came a day after lawmakers advanced a measure to raise their base pay from $16,800 to $40,000.
Meanwhile, House Bill 40 by Rep. Delisha Boyd, D-New Orleans, would have outlawed sexual identity and gender discrimination in workplaces. That bill failed on a 7-5 party line vote with Democrats in support and Republicans opposed, despite Boyd's claims that it would help grow the state's workforce and be a particular help to vulnerable populations.
"How are members of the LGBTQ community expected to live up to their fullest potential without gainful and meaningful employment?" Boyd said.
Conservative leaders such as East Baton Rouge Republican Party Chairman Woody Jenkins and Slidell Pastor John Raymond, who faces criminal child cruelty allegations, also appeared in the committee to oppose that bill.
Elections for governor and other statewide officers are gearing up and lawmakers sometimes shy away from votes on controversial issues in election years.
Yet this session, House panels have already passed bans on gender-affirming health care for transgender children, discussions of sexuality in classrooms and teachers using pronouns or names that differ from students’ birth certificates — all issues that House and Senate leadership sought to downplay before a session that also addresses fiscal issues.
