UPDATE: To see the results and learn if your Senator is accounted for, visit MN Senate minimum wage constituent Whip Count. If you don't see her or him there, make contact and ask!
Both the Pioneer Press and the Star Tribune are reporting that the Senate and House conference committee are deadlocked over tying the minimum wage to increases in inflation.--an index as the proponents are calling it.
Doug Belden reports in the Pioneer Press article, Minimum wage negotiators deadlocked on inflation calculator:
The key sticking point is whether to tie the minimum wage to increases in inflation.
The House bill would increase the wage annually by the Consumer Price Index or 2.5 percent, whichever is less.
The Senate doesn't want any inflator in the bill.
The House offered a different metric than CPI on Wednesday -- the "implicit price deflator" -- but the Senate turned it down.
Rachel Stassen-Berger reports in On minimum wage negotiations, a 'stalemate' for now:
After some blunt words and two days of tense meetings, legislative negotiators on minimum wage have reached an impasse for now. . . .
Senate Majority Leader Tom Bakk, DFL-Cook, said on Tuesday that if the House insisted on including an inflationary bump, "there won't be a bill."
House Speaker Paul Thissen, DFL-Minneapolis, replied, "if the Senate wants to kill the bill, they should just tell Minnesotans directly."
While tempers appeared to have cooled publicly by Wednesday, legislators were still stymied over the question of inflation in minimum wage increases come 2017.
"The inflator is a non-starter in the Senate. I don't have the votes," Sen. Chris Eaton, a Brooklyn Center Democrat who is the Senate's chief negotiator, said on Wednesday.
The negotiators, who met every day this week, will not meet publicly again until Monday. Winkler suggested that in the interim it may be helpful for lawmakers to talk about creative approaches to dealing with the inflation question.
Bluestem Prairie agrees with a suggestion tweeted by Minneapolis journalist David Brauer:
Some site should do a constituent-sourced scorecard of where DFL Senators stand on indexing $9.50 minimum wage. Hell, all Sens maybe.
— David Brauer (@dbrauer) March 6, 2014
We replied that Bluestem is happy to create this scorecard. A "whip count" is a preliminary vote count that assesses whether a bill will pass in one or both chambers of a legislature. The Minnesota House has already passed an "indexed" minimun wage increase.
Help us compile a Minnesota Senate whip count on raising minimum wage & indexing future increases
Thus, we need your help. If you have contacted your Minnesota state senator about:
1) how your Senator will vote on raising the state minimum wage to $9.50 by 2015
2) how your Senator stands on indexing future indexes to inflation
please let us know what his or her response has been, if any, to your query.
Please document how you received this information--via email, a phone call or a phone call. This information can be submitted via our moderated comments or via email ([email protected]). Regardless of which method you use, let us know if you want your comment or email posted or to remain private. It's okay if you want to remain anonymous to our readership--Bluestem simply needs to have documentation for our own record keeping.
Update: Only definite "yes" votes will go in the yes columns.
We'll be updating this post with a chart, starting with Democrats, and we're considering having the default setting for DFLers be no on both accounts, since it appears that members of the majority caucus are the stumbling blocks.
But the whip count will be for both parties, and we'll have a third column for "media" for reports of senators' positions.
What is a crowd-sourced whip count?
Open Congress and other open government sites pioneered the idea of crowd-sourced whip counts. These tools and actions have allowed the public to participate in knowing where their US Senators and Representatives stand on bills before Congress.
We won't be building a wiki, and since the MN Senate includes 67 members, the task of updating the charts won't be as daunting as a full federal whip count.
Thanks to David Brauer for the request. Please refrain from getting off-topic in your comments and emails. Let's hope we can construct a solid whip count by the time the conference committee convenes again on Monday.
For more on indexing future increases, check out Jeff Van Wychen's post, Indexing the Minimum Wage is Common Sense, at MN2020.
Photo: A graphic whip count, via Huffington Post.
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