MANCHESTER, Conn.Thanksgiving, some Connecticut Democratic state legislators said at a press conference the
other day, is when Americans should be with their families, and so state law
should require retailers open on the holiday to pay their employees a punitive
doubletime and a half.
The sentiment is lovely but it's a hallucination -- because for every big-box
retail store employee who wishes that he didn't have to work on Thanksgiving
there are a thousand people clogging the aisles of his store thrilled to have
gotten away from their families, many of them having
already attended a high-school football game and many others planning to go to
the movies afterward.
Who will introduce the legislation requiring the shoppers to stay home so that the
retail employees can stay home too? By what necessity does the government get so
intrusive in people's personal lives?
General working conditions have been government's domain for decades, but the
country already has minimum-wage and overtime laws. With more people shopping
than working in retailing on Thanksgiving, why obstruct democracy?
Further, why, with a doubletime-and-a-half law, drive up the costs of
bricks-and-mortar retailing, which pays plenty of state sales and local property
taxes, and thereby give more advantage to Internet retailing, which doesn't?
The Thanksgiving doubletime proposal is just more pious pandering to a special
interest at the expense of the public interest.
But pandering to special interests pays well in Connecticut politics, as
suggested by the announcement this week from the Connecticut Education
Association, the state's biggest teachers union, that it will hire Senate
President Pro Tem Donald E. Williams Jr. as its deputy policy director when he
leaves office in January.
"Don is a strong advocate for public education and teachers," CEA President
Sheila Cohen declared, which was to say that during his 22 years in the General
Assembly Williams has been a reliable vote for the union. While state law
forbids Williams from accepting money for lobbying state government until he has
been out of office for a year, nothing prevents him from advising the union's
lobbyists until the revolving door is unlocked.
But if Williams has been a tool of the teachers, most Democratic legislators
are, and if this ever bothered his constituents, they could have replaced him --
at least if newspapers and rival candidates had dared to make the point.
Further, government in Connecticut is now so pervasive and legislative salaries
so low that almost any employment undertaken by a legislator may present
opportunities to exploit his office and increase his incentive to be a tool for
somebody.
Still, it's a matter of degree, and since no special interest is bigger than the
CEA, Williams's new job can't help smelling like a payoff, especially since he
does not seem to have been eager to pursue a career in private industry -- not
that there is much private industry left in his part of
the state, northeastern Connecticut.
A few months ago Williams applied for the presidency of Quinebaug Valley
Community College, in Killingly, near his home in Thompson on the Rhode Island
border. Every cynic in the state was stunned that this
payoff didn't come through, stunned that the community college board hired
someone else, someone with a background in education -- though of course even a
former politician might have a better grasp of the real world than a career
educator.
But at least the Senate Democrats have found a sinecure for Williams. Now they
have to figure out what to do with state Sen. Andrew Maynard, of Stonington,
hospitalized incommunicado for months with a serious brain injury two years
short of his state pension qualification. How much really can be asked of the
CEA?
So could any of the big corporations that have received millions in "economic
development" money from the Democratic state administration just to stick around
use a deputy policy director?
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
