>The Massachusetts Blue Law controls which businesses can operate on Sundays and on some legal holidays. For some retailers in the state, they are required to pay employees a premium rate on Sundays if the business employs more than seven workers.

>However, since 2018 this rate has been slowly declining and by January 1, 2023, that premium payments will be eliminated.

I didn't know about this one. I get that state shouldn't legally treat Sunday as different than any other day, but it sucks that people are losing that extra pay.

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I mean, they’re not really losing it. When MA approved the minimum wage increase, this was the compromise they made in phasing out Sunday pay while increasing minimum wage incrementally over the last 5 or so years. So the thought is that people are compensated for the lost Sunday pay in the form of increased wages overall.

This one leaves me fuming at the leftists and liberals who supported this anti-labor legislation and pulled a conservative-style "screwing myself to own the righties".

Yeah, Blue Laws come from our extreme puritanical past. Eliminating them mostly makes sense. But having one day a week where laborers get extra pay sounds like a pretty freaking amazing thing regardless of history.

Glad the supermarkets and megacorps can save some bucks (that don't get passed onto consumers) though, good for them.

>This one leaves me fuming at the leftists and liberals who supported this anti-labor legislation and pulled a conservative-style "screwing myself to own the righties".

This is hilarious.

This is correct, but there's also no reason we couldn't have had both.

I agree, but ultimately it’s a balancing act of placating fiscally conservative politicians while still increasing wages for most.

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Should have moved the premium day to Saturday and watch as we get service again bc people are fighting for that shift. People wanted the Sunday shift because it was slow and paid premium time. I don’t see any advantage to working the weekend at all anymore and if it were me I would be available m-f only on any retail job app.

Ping the “closed on sunday, no one wants to work” signs.

Some holidays and all sundays are the same pay. That blows and is basically 0 incentive to sacrifice time on those days. Nice

That’s basically a side effect of the minimum wage increase. This was a quid pro quo from the retail industry in exchange for not fighting that harder

It wasn’t even so much fiscally conservative politicians so much as the stores and retail interests.

>fiscally conservative politicians

>Stores and retail interests

I can't tell these two apart.

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can we not fix this with a ballot question?

Mind you I’m still in a New Years Eve haze, but this year let’s pass bills for Happy Hour, letting places stay open later, and more liquor licenses.

Is this not AMERICA? Is Massachusetts not the true birthplace of America? We can do this fellow Bay Staters.

$2400/mo? You're referring to full time employment. As the minimum wage goes up more and more lower tier jobs will be part time.

There is always going to be jobs that are the lowest paid jobs. Raising pay on those jobs will generally lead to pay increases fo the jobs that used to pay that amount but “should” pay more. It will generally trickle up and lead to inflation.

So people who recognized this purchased lower cost housing, such as mobile parks, and will be the ones who ultimately benefit

Why should you need more incentive to work Sunday over any other day of the week? I wouldn't expect overtime if I worked a Wednesday to Sunday schedule.

What's more, there were already a ton of exemptions for a majority of job sectors. I just don't see any value or fairness in a law with such uneven enforcement.

Its primary purpose was to encourage people to go to church, and it has outlived that function. We shouldn't be clinging to nonsensical laws to alleviate issues that should be tackled more directly with laws actually based on modern standards. That's regressive thinking.

Keep raising it and they will just keep raising prices. It’s why the free market works best. Not more price fixing.

Yeah probably because it was Baker who approved it brought forth from an organization made of businesses and fiscal conservatives in our own government. The Venn diagram is a circle and we all got fucked. I for one like having holidays off and with no force to discourage opening on them we’ll have to work them.

We should try. But this time come back harder and get double time on Sundays and holidays.

I saw this shift happen before my last job closed. No more full time opportunities and all worker hours were extensively tracked so no one was going over the full time threshold. This was in an effort to not have to pay benefits in addition to increased wages.

So the reason why we are going to lose having holidays is because people with the level of wealth we’ll never achieve said it was bad for them. They can go to hell.

How about every election cycle we have a ballot question on whether politician raises should be approved or not. They supposedly work for us so why the hell not.

And also a sneak attack by the legislature to usurp a ballot initiative that proposed to raise the minimum wage to $15 without any changes to Sundays/Holidays.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Happy Hour didn't make it onto the ballot.

https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Repeal_Prohibition_on_%22Happy_Hours%22_Initiative_(2022)

Keeping in mind that is only legally requirements. Employers can do whatever they want so long as the meet the legal minimum. So with competition high for workers in minimum wage type jobs, employers may still be incentivised to offer overtime pay for certain days to get people to work even though they are not legally required to do so. Same reason many places already pay at least $15 before this law went into effect.

I loved working double-pay holidays when I was in high school.

Yeah, this dude’s a complete moron.

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Because we already voted on how that should work and we're happy with it.

Anyway, most people dont have the first clue about what those working in the state house do. They would be terrible evaluators.

Also, they don't work for us in the same sense that you hire someone to mow your lawn. You don't get to haggle salary with them and you shouldn't. Politicians are voted in, they have a set of goals and promises and they work with a lot of other people toward making our state a better place to live. If people aren't satisfied with their performance, it's enough power that the people can vote them out the next election.

I, personally, would get really tired of voting on raises every term. Just keep it attached to median household income. They basically track with inflation and thats fine with me.

Service wages need to abolished. It’s a minimum wage for a reason. If you get tips, cool! But the idea that anyone earning $6.75 an hour “actually” earns $15 an hour thanks to tips is ludicrous. I’m sure some waitstaff do, but it’s a minority.

Also agricultural workers deserve a minimum wage as well.

Wait, do you think most wait staff make less than $15 an hour? You should come by r/talesfromyourserver

To clear something up.....

15 x 40 = 600

(12 x 32) + (15 x 8) = 504

Isn't the $15 an hour better than what it was before the law was rolled out?

The MA legislature seems to meddle in every single ballot initiative when they don’t get what they want. It would be nice if we had a law that protected ballot initiatives from having any related laws implemented for 5 years or something

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>I don't think a lot of people realize how awful it is to be poor, even in Massachusetts with all the supposed social safety nets we have.

Massholes do not care. We're busy patting ourselves on the back for being better than Florida for the middle and upper class.

If you point out that inequality is a huge problem in MA and it's actually a very difficult place to survive for working class people, the response is pretty much, "Wahhh, boo hoo, go live in the South and see how you like it there."

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I’m all for raising the minimum wage. The problem is with jobs that paid over minimum wage anyway. Let’s say someone was earning $16 an hour. Before the new law started to take effect, they would have been earning $704 gross per week (32 hours at $16, 8 hours at $24). That person wouldn’t benefit from the minimum wage increase because they already earn over that amount. Now, that same worker would be earning $640 a week.

I know the math isn’t perfect because that worker would have been given raises (likely in the realm of 20c a year or so) during that time, but it gives you an idea of why some people are unhappy about it.

I’m a salaried M-F type, but my husband is an hourly retail manager and a lot of the folks he works with right on that minimum wage cusp have found it really tough to slowly lose their Sunday/holiday pay.

That's fair. I disagree that it should pay more, but that's why we got democracy. I guess my bigger hangup is that uneven enforcement. There's 55 exemptions! I've worked in a few different industries, and the only one I can ever remember paying overtime for Sundays was retail. Not food service, which has the same problems. Not logistics, despite also being notoriously underpaid and often with odd hours. If it were updated and clarified with a more direct vision of what it's for, I would at least find that acceptable.

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Just because it's a fair argument doesn't necessarily mean I have to agree. I think it would put an undue burden on too many businesses who operate 24 hours, or ones which do the most business on weekends explicitly because that's when others aren't working, or small businesses. Which is why we ended up with so many weird exemptions. You aren't going to legislate Walmart into being a good employe. I'm all for worker protections and would love to see more unionization, so then employees could petition their employer directly if they think these provisions are necessary. That's the only way to break up our shitty labor culture.

This classified as “saying that to yourself in the mirror while wearing sunglasses” level of cringe

This is all disregarding taxes & other withholdings-

If you worked every Sunday in a year at 1.5* premium, you would earn $9,360 when making $15/hr. Now, you earn 1* on Sundays, equaling $6,240 per year, with a diffence of $3,120.

If you worked every Holiday in a year at 1.5* premium (with 9 Holidays) you would earn $1,620 when making $15/hr. Now, you earn 1* on Holidays, equaling $1,080 per year, with a difference of $540.

Together, this is a loss of $3,660.

Minimum wage in 2018 was $11/hr.

Minimum wage in 2023 is $15/hr.

Annually, income was $25,564 in 2018 if you worked every Sunday and every Holiday.

Annually, income is $31,200 in 2023 across the board.

Even if you subtract the $3,660 “loss” from the minimum annual earnings in 2023, the difference is still a gain of $1,976 for all minimum wage earners.

Furthermore, when taking inflation into account, $1 in 2018 is equivalent to $1.19 in 2023. In 2018, $25,564 would be equal to $30,324.12 today, meaning that an annual minimum income of $31,200 is more than keeping up with inflation.

I totally understand how this doesn’t benefit those making above minimum wage and actually is decreasing their annual earnings by eliminating Sunday and Holiday pay. That’s part of the reason why they called the bill the “Great Bargain,” it’s a balancing act and they’re hoping that the wage increases will trickle up and be reflected across the board over time.

I would also be great if we had state based electoral colleges. it’s fun to dream…

Right, this second post is what I was getting at. It’s why not everyone is happy with the change. Some workers are actually earning LESS under the guise of progress. So in response to your initial post, some people are in fact losing it.

Sorry but price fixing has never worked

I get the idea but the point of our system isn't to govern by ballot initiative. The practical outcome of that kind of restriction is that pretty much any new law is going to be held up by faux initiatives. Legislature considering a police reform bill? Every FOP in the state would gather signatures for a ballot question to neuter the issue. You'd basically neuter the government in favor of a less efficient method that isn't even guaranteed to get the best results.

It was really 2 ballot measures and both the groups involved had enough signatures and backed down willingly because the bill was there. Government by referendum is a terrible way to go. It's inefficient, prone to erratic results and that state has more misses than hits on ballot questions. I'm not sure a straight "raise the minimum wage this much by this date" question passes with all the money that'd be thrown against it.

No, people are absolutely losing it.

Not sure about your math on that one. It was time and a half, so at $12 an hour you’d be making $18 an hour on Sunday’s.

Anyways, change it to $16 and:

16 X 40 = 640

(16 X 32) + (24 X 8) = 704

Yeah I screwed that up. By why are you using 16? The reason they don't do time and half is because it's 16. So you'd have to do the math of what it was before. And that was $12. Not 16.

> Yeah I screwed that up. By why are you using 16?

I'm making the point that people not making minimum wage are negatively affected.

I can barely live on $28 an hour much longer, gettin tired of workin 50+ a week just to struggle by. I dunno how people do it with families. Me and a cat and that’s pushin it.