After All Things
Seats up for grabs
Support for After All Things comes from the listeners of WSHU, a public radio station, serving Connecticut and Long Island. For daily news and culture from around the sound, listen at WSHU.org or download the WSHU app. You're listening to After All Things, WSHU's daily news and culture update from a long Island Sound region. Early voting for Connecticut primary elections starts today. Homelessness is up in Connecticut for the third straight year. L.I.W.R. writers say they're mostly satisfied with service, and Connecticut's wage theft complete backlog is growing. For stories and more are coming up, I'm Sabrina Garone. Early voting for the August 13th primary elections in Connecticut begins today. WSHU's Molly Ingram has more on what offices are up for grabs and how to find your local polling place. This is the first year that Connecticut residents have the opportunity to vote early and in-person for seven days leading up to the election. Governor Ned Lamont signed the legislation last year. "Make it easier for people to vote with integrity, it makes a really good sense." This year, all of the state senate and house of representative seats are up for grabs and some have primaries. There will be two federal Republican primaries, one to decide who will run against incumbent Democratic representative Jim Himes in the fourth district, and one to decide who will run against incumbent Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. There are no federal Democratic primaries in Connecticut. To find your early voting site, visit the Secretary of State's website. Molly Ingram, WSHU News. Connecticut residents want the state to spend more on human services like health care and education that's according to a recent survey conducted of likely voters, WSHU's Janice Roman Hasmore. A recent poll released by Change Research found 68% of likely voters surveyed would support changes to fiscal guardrails to increase funding for community nonprofits. The private nonprofit social service agency is based in San Francisco. Voters say a portion of the state budget surpluses should go toward funding community-based nonprofits that deliver state sponsored social services. And 8% suggested using the surplus dollars to pay down pension debt for state employees. More than half say they would likely support a candidate who wants to increase nonprofit spending. Janice Roman, WSHU News. More and more people are homeless in Connecticut. An annual statewide count found the number of homeless people in the state rose for the third year in a row. WSHU's Davis Donovan reports. Advocates blame a lack of affordable housing with both rents and home prices surging in the last few years. Sarah Fox is with the Connecticut Council to end homelessness. Seniors not being able to afford housing, our families holding down jobs, but unable to afford housing are a livable wage. And what you need to earn to be able to afford housing is driving more and more households into homelessness. The annual survey called the Point in Time Count found more than 3,400 unhoused people in Connecticut on a single night in January. That's about 400 more than last year and the most since 2016. Homelessness had been dropping before the pandemic, but in 2021, it started rising again. About one in five unhoused people in Connecticut are children and nearly one in four are elderly. Davis Donovan, WSHU News. Complaints over wage theft and other labor violations in Connecticut are piling up while proposals that would have increased staff failed to pass. More on that is ahead, first a message from our supporter. Local support comes from Hartford HealthCare. The only health system in the Northeast, with all its hospitals receiving A grades for safety from the LeapFrog Group, the nation's leading independent safety watchdog group, HartfordHealthCare.org. Clean up continued into this morning after a round of strong thunderstorms hit our region this weekend, leading to power outages, flash flooding and downed trees. Ever source and UI reported at the height of the storms, there were over 21,000 outages across Connecticut, mostly in Fairfield County, Shelton and Trumbull were especially hit hard. Lightning strikes also set two houses on fire in Manchester and Suthington. Most riders on the LIDublar are happy with service overall according to a survey, but riders on eight of its 11 branches were a little less satisfied in the spring than the fall. Newsday reports around 17,000 customers responded to a survey between April and May of this year. Only Port Washington, Oyster Bay and Babylon branches saw higher satisfaction compared to the fall of 2023. Riders also said they were less satisfied with cleanliness and seat availability. Great hitchhikers, that's what one expert calls spotted lanternflies. The invasive crop killers can be found throughout New York State. Officials are asking the public to help stop them from spreading further. Rob Cole is with the Department of Environmental Conservation. He says the pests like to travel by car. They can hop on in and then you go for a drive and they'll hop on out somewhere else. That's how a lot of them get around just straight up right inside the vehicle. Cole says spotted lanternflies will hitch a ride along the edges of wheel wells and grills and the bottom of windshield wipers. Open windows in parked cars are another favorite. He's urging residents to do whatever they can to eradicate them. The Connecticut Labor Department lacks the staff to deal with a growing backlog of wage theft complaints. Jose Luis Martinez from the Connecticut Mirror has done in-depth reporting on this and he spoke all about it with WSHU's Abong Udama. It's part of the collaborative podcast, Long Story Short. You've followed the wage theft crisis in Connecticut for a while now. Were you surprised by last month's state auditors report that found complaints over the wage theft are piling up while legislative proposals that would have increased Labor Department staff have failed? Not really. This is one of the many things that hasn't been funded in state government. It's not an issue that's unique to the Labor Department's wage and workplace standards division. It's an issue that's been seeing across a lot of agencies that say they're understaffed. This piece just took a very detailed look at this division in particular. You came up with some graphs here. One is a statistical analysis that shows that wages recovered by the Department of Labor are at the lowest they've been since 1984. The other illustrates that the number of investigators is lower than it was in 2015. Could you just explain what we see in those graphs? This wage and workplace standards division, what they do is they investigate complaints of unpaid wages, among other labor violations. Every year they report how many wages they've recovered for workers. There is some data available online through administrative reports to the governor at the Labor Department. We wanted to go back in time. We wanted to see, are these levels we're seeing now, which are 2.4 million as of last year? Is this the lowest it's been in decades in a while? Is this a high? Is this a low? We went to the state library. We combed through these administrative reports and we were able to paint a picture to show that these are the lowest level in wage recoveries that the Department has seen in decades. At the same time, what we've seen in the past decade is that the stop levels at this unit has decreased, particularly the number of wage and hour investigators, which investigate overtime, minimum wage, and also wage enforcement agents, which have a broader mandate. They investigate things like commissions, bonuses, etc. Now, you showed that we were recovering about $5 million a year and it's come down to $2.4 million. What does that mean for the workers who are affected? Because we have a situation here where they haven't paid their wages. Mm-hmm. Yeah, so at the same time that there's less investigators, so there's less investigators able to recoup wages for workers. Now, at the same time, because of this decreasing stop levels, there's also been an increasing backlog of cases. And what this means is cases that haven't been assigned to an investigator yet. So to put things clearly, if a worker were to submit a complaint right now at the Department of Labor regarding unpaid wages, they'd have to wait anywhere from six to eight months, according at least to when investigators testified in this year's legislative session. So it's taken a while to just even hear back about these cases. So it's not just that the division is recovering less money, but that they're also taking longer to do it. So workers are waiting longer to hear back about their cases. And some probably will never get those wages back. Yeah, it depends. There's some cases investigators have noted where by the time they're able to investigate a complaint, the employer that's accused of not paying wages is already closed or they filed bankruptcy or the worker already moved out of state. So yeah, there's a lot of implications for it taking that long to recover these wages. Now, Jose, you spent some time looking at what was being done in the legislature. What happened? I mean, they had proposals on the table. What happened to those proposals to increase the staff in 2023 and in this year's legislative session, there were proposals to increase staff at this division. And they both didn't, you know, they didn't pass mainly this year because they just didn't adjust the budget, but last year, the other was a bill that would have increased the number of investigators to 45 from the current, you know, it depends on the definition of how you define wage and hour inspectors, but it could have been anywhere. It would have cost a few millions to fund this. But you know what they told me last year, you know, simply put it's that it's competing interests. There's a lot of things that need funding. But again, you know, the administration wants to keep piling up the rainy fund. So, you know, just didn't pass last year, didn't pass this year, and advocates are hoping to be able to pass the bill again next year. Well, with this auditors report, you think that we'll actually try and put some pressure and lawmakers to get this done next year because it's getting, it seems to be getting worse. From what I'm hearing from what the legislators told me is it's something that they want to focus on and that they're hoping to target next year. And you know, we reported on this figure, you know, this 800 figure that the auditors came out with, this year we reported, in fact, an increased number because the other report knows the 800 case backlog that's as of that's a couple of years, that's a couple of years back now. Mm hmm. That's as of 2020. So you had the backlog in that thousand. Okay. So basically it's getting worse than what the auditors are telling us. Yes. Correct. It's just now it's official, right? The auditors went in and they put out the official report beyond what just the labor department was telling us. Okay. So what's the process right now? Is there fresh legislation that's going to be introduced next year? What's going on? Yeah. Advocates are hoping that the bill's back on the table. You know, as for the specifics, from my understanding, they want, they want to make, they want to write a bill that passes. You know, the problem has been that it's too costly, you know, because again, the fiscal note for this 2024 bill was $6 million. And not just because they had to hire more investigators, but they had to hire more supervisors. So supervisors to manage these new investigators. So whether it's by tapering off the initial costs, there's no indication as to what the exact bill language will be next year, but they are hoping to pass it. Because as you mentioned, you know, the case backlog is growing. And even if the backlog wasn't there, one thing that the Department of Labor wants to continue to do is proactive enforcement, which is where they go beyond just investigating complaints, but they also do inspections, you know, and they already do it, but they want to continue doing it. They want to do inspections of industries where, you know, there's a lot of low-level income workers that tend to suffer at least labor violations. Well, thank you very much, Jose. Thank you. Jose Luis Martinez is the Connecticut Mirror's data reporter. I'm Abong Udon. Thank you so much for listening to After All Things, supported by Hartford HealthCare. For more stories from the Long Island Sound region, listen on the radio, stream online at WSHU.org or download the WSHU app. That's also where you can check out more great podcasts from WSHU, like Long Story Short, or listen wherever you get your podcasts. And as always, reach out with any thoughts or story ideas. Our email is news@wshu.org. I'm Sabrina Garroen, enjoy the rest of your day, and I'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye. for now. for now. for now. [BLANK_AUDIO]