HARTFORD — A bill that would order staffing levels at retail and grocery stores with self-checkout areas quietly failed on Friday, but the chief proponent of the bill said that sometimes it takes years to bring legislative initiatives to the finish line.
In reaction, Wayne Pesce, president of the Connecticut Food Association, voiced relief that the proposal would get no further in the current legislative session.
“Obviously the Judiciary Committee saw the serious flaw in the bill,” Pesce said after the committee meeting. “The bill was specifically aimed at grocers and the operators of privately run businesses, not to mention many consumers prefer their convenience and choose self checkout.”
If the bill had become law, stores would have been required to have one employee-staffed checkout register for every two self-checkout stations. The bill would have also limited the total number of self-checkouts to eight per store.
The legislation died during a morning meeting of the Judiciary Committee after Sen. Gary Winfield, D-New Haven, co-chairman of the panel, did not call it for discussion. He said there wasn’t much support for the measure at a time when there’s less than three weeks before the General Assembly’s midnight, May 6 adjournment.
“I have to give in every once in a while,” Winfield said after the meeting. “It just wasn’t going to make it today.”
State Rep. Craig Fishbein of Wallingford, a ranking Republican on the law-writing committee, said the proposal would have told people how to run their businesses. “It’s the fruits of the arbitrary raising of the minimum wage,” Fishbein said of the cost-saving measure of self-checkouts. “Businesses are forced to go to the systems as a result of raising the minimum wage. He said that the state’s now-$16.94-per-hour minimum wage has also resulted in fewer jobs on state farms, along with more mechanization.
“It was a little counter-intuitive also,” Fishbein said in an interview. “The ratio, the two-to-one and then you couldn’t have more than eight of them, didn’t make a lot of sense. How can you say to a business that you have to have a ratio but you can only have this many? It doesn’t make any sense.”
State Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, co-chairwoman of the legislative Labor and Public Employees Committee where the bill originated, said in the state Capitol on Friday that some measures take multiple years.
“The self-checkout bill, I think, is a really important bill, but as so often happens in this building, the first time we bring out a bill – a new concept – it often takes some time to really educate people enough to understand the importance of it,”” she said.
Kushner, who is running for reelection, believes that the concept will be raised again next year.