Posts tagged Janet Mills
Mills First Two Vetos Nix Farmworker Unionization and Indigent Defense Bills
June 25, 2025 // “LD 588 is substantively identical to L.D. 525 in the 131st Legislature, a bill of the same name that I vetoed. Because the bill is unchanged, so too is my veto letter,” Mills wrote. “(It) would create a new legal framework governing labor-management relations in Maine’s agricultural sector. The bill would authorize agricultural workers to engage in certain concerted activity, and create a new regulatory structure for complaints, hearings and enforcement by the Maine Labor Relations Board. This is complex legislation with cross references to federal law, including the National Labor Relations Act.” Mills added that “against this background I cannot subject our farmers to a complicated new set of labor laws that will require a lawyer just to understand. Now is not the time to impose a new regulatory burden on our agricultural sector, and particularly not family-owned farms that are not well positioned to know and understand their obligations under a new such law.”
Even Gavin Newsom opposes this Big Labor inflationary scheme
November 4, 2024 // Likewise, PLA opponents can cite multiple studies of hundreds of taxpayer-funded affordable housing and school construction projects, which found that government PLA mandates increase the cost of construction by 12% to 20% compared to similar non-PLA projects already subjected to union-friendly prevailing wage regulations. The latest study of affordable housing projects funded by Los Angeles Proposition HHH found that PLA projects were 21% more expensive and suffered delays 27% longer than non-PLA projects.
MAINE: Mills vetoes farm worker minimum wage hike
April 28, 2024 // "Small family farms will no longer be independent businesses, but will be subsidiaries of large producers contracting out production processes or out of business completely," Julie Ann Smith, the bureau's executive director, said in recent testimony. "You do not have masses of agricultural workers clamoring for unionization. But you have farmers pleading with you not to destroy their livelihoods." Lawmakers could vote to override Mills' objections when they reconvene in August, but the slim margin by which the package of bills was passed will make it difficult to garner the two-thirds majority needed to reverse the governor's decision. In 2022, lawmakers failed to muster enough votes to override Mills' veto of a similar farm worker package that had called for closing loopholes in state and federal labor laws for farm workers, who are not covered by Maine’s minimum wage and overtime regulations.