The man was said to be the only electrician in Mora, and my agency forced him out of business.
This was around 20 years ago. I learned about it in a staff meeting. The assistant general counsel who told us about it had tears in her eyes and a quiver in her voice, but she did it anyway.
My concern wasn’t just about the electrician. It was about all the people in an economically distressed county who might have needed his services and now would not have them.
The assistant general counsel said the electrician was semiretired but wanted to keep his license to do occasional odd jobs. But we – the Workers’ Compensation Administration – required him to buy a minimum premium workers’ compensation insurance policy, and he would not make enough money to justify the cost. So he was forced out of business.
The requirement is in paragraph 52-1-6 of the New Mexico statute, and if I try to explain it here I won’t get to my main point. I will simply say that in my opinion this was regulatory overreach based on the interpretation of one word. Nobody in the agency agreed with me, but I was not surprised that this happened. There were probably many similar stories that we never knew about.
That’s what happens when people who write a law neglect the little guy.
The little guys, very small business owners, are never at the table when laws are being drafted. They don’t participate, maybe because they don’t know how, maybe because they are too busy.
Very small businesses are one group that concerns me in relation to the current push to enact a paid family and medical leave law in New Mexico. This year’s bill was voted down, but we know it’s coming back.
Another vulnerable group is social-service nonprofits, including those that provide services like adoption, foster care and personal service to elderly clients or those with disabilities. Many of these nonprofits work under contract to state government. Here’s an unpleasant little secret: When the state enacts laws that directly increase the costs of paying employees, those laws apply to nonprofits as well as for-profit businesses, but the state does not necessarily increase what it pays to those nonprofits.
I watched this for years with a friend who ran a nonprofit agency. Every few years she would tell me the state had made a change that cut her funding, which forced her to eliminate something. The myth was that there were always inefficiencies that could be cut. But that was possible only for the first couple of cuts. After that the cuts were to real services affecting real people – the clients.
Rep. Marian Matthews has raised this issue. Matthews, D-Albuquerque, introduced a moderate and less costly alternative to the family and medical leave bill. Matthews’ bill was tabled in its first committee. She had been talking specifically about the severe costs to families when caregiver services are cut.
Our Legislature has been generous to employees in the last few years. We’ve increased the minimum wage from $7.50 an hour in 2018 to $12 an hour in 2023. Our paid sick leave law, enacted in 2022, requires employers to pay for up to 64 hours per year of sick leave. The employer also faces the cost of finding and paying for a replacement worker or going without whatever service the worker was providing.
Both the minimum wage and the sick leave program are meritorious, but legislators should be asking, before enacting another new employer responsibility, whether the administrative requirements of the sick leave program are reasonable or excessively burdensome.
And we should be making sure that employers at all levels, including the little guys, are being heard. Contact Merilee Dannemann through www.triplespacedagain.com.