Workers’ rights legislation, which would establish safety regulations for warehouse workers and provide unemployment benefits for striking workers after two weeks on the picket line, will head to the Senate floor following a March vote of the legislature’s Labor Committee.
Although Republican members of the Labor and Public Employees Committee voted against raising the bill and against sending the bill to the Senate floor, the Democratic majority on the committee advanced the bill on March 6 when they voted at the end of a five and a half hour committee meeting.
Senate Democrats introduced the bill in January as one of the caucus’s top legislative priorities for the 2025 legislative session.
A week later, Senate President Pro Tem Martin Looney, D-New Haven, and Senate Majority Leader Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, as well as Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, who is Senate chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, announced their support for the two main concepts in Senate Bill 8: warehouse worker safety, and unemployment benefits for striking workers who have been out on the picket line for more than two weeks.
“There’s an insidious nature to modern fulfillment centers where employee safety often takes a back seat to corporate greed,” Looney said at the time. “We’ll address that this session.”
S.B. 8 seeks to protect warehouse workers by requiring employers to give their employees a written description of the quotas they must meet, and any possible adverse employment actions they may face for failing to do so.
The bill also seeks to help striking workers who have been out on strike for at least 14 days. Under current Connecticut law, striking workers are only entitled to unemployment benefits if a company locks them out of the worksite – but not if a company negotiates in bad faith to cause a strike, or negotiates in bad faith to prolong a strike.
Kushner said the legislation would help to level the playing field.
“What we’re doing with the striking workers bill is we’re providing them with the opportunity – through the extension of unemployment benefits – to exercise their rights under federal law, without the fear of being starved out,” she said. “Other states have already done this, and it’s working.”
If adopted, the proposal would bring Connecticut in line with nearby states like New York and New Jersey, where state policymakers have already extended unemployment benefits to striking workers.
S.B. 8 received a public hearing on Feb. 7, when written testimony in support of the bill outnumbered opposition by a margin of three-to-one.
Ed Hawthorne, president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO, was among the supporters of the bill to offer testimony. Hawthorne said the disparity between corporate profits and worker wages made it difficult for workers to advocate for fair treatment without enduring economic hardship.
“Rather than negotiate in good faith, some employers make unreasonable demands to force employees to strike, attempting to ‘starve them out,’” Hawthorne said. “Some employers strategically weaponize the economic instability of their employees to suppress wages and working conditions. The law allows employers to leverage the threat of evictions, foreclosures and repossessions because striking workers cannot access unemployment benefits.”
