Democratic co-chairs of legislature’s Labor Committee defend favoring workers

One is a midwesterner from a family of grocery store owners. The other is a city native raised by a single mom.

While those descriptions over-simplify who they are, they nonetheless highlight the contrast between the co-chairs of the General Assembly’s Labor and Public Employees Committee.

Together, Sen. Julie Kushner (D-Danbury) and Rep. Manny Sanchez (D-New Britain) lead a committee that is one of the most closely watched by businesses and industry groups in Connecticut, and with good reason.

Over the past six years, it has helped push through bills supported by labor groups and opposed by the business community that ultimately became law. They include:

• Paid family and medical leave;
• Linking the state’s minimum wage to the federal employment cost index, which as of Jan. 1 has raised the rate to $16.35 per hour;
• The “captive audience” law, which prohibits employers from mandating meetings to share views on religious or political issues, including unionization; and
• Expansion of the state’s paid sick leave law.

Kushner was first elected to the Senate in 2018, and has chaired the Labor Committee since 2019. Sanchez was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2020, and joined the committee as vice chair in 2021, before becoming co-chair in 2023.

Both say they are proud of the labor-supporting bills they helped shepherd into law, seeing it as the committee’s mission.

Others, including the Connecticut Business & Industry Association (CBIA), disagree with that view of the committee’s purpose.

With more pro-labor legislation on the agenda in the 2025 session — including protecting warehouse employees and allowing striking workers to receive unemployment benefits — the Labor Committee, and its co-chairs, remain a focal point.

Union organizer

Kushner, 72, was born in Hamburg, Iowa, but grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin.

After working as a secretary in college and discovering that women were not treated equally in the workplace, she embarked on what became a 40-year career in organized labor with the United Auto Workers.

“I had a long work life in labor, organizing workers, representing workers, negotiating on behalf of workers, lobbying on behalf of workers,” Kushner said.

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HBJ PHOTO | DAVID KRECHEVSKY

Sen. Julie Kushner (D-Danbury) said the state’s paid family and medical leave program helps small businesses compete with big corporations that offer more benefits.

When it was suggested that her union work is what shapes her philosophy as Labor co-chair, however, Kushner pushed back.

“Don’t assume you know everything about me,” she said. “I think a lot of who I am as a person really comes from the way I was brought up.”

She says she learned from her family that it’s important to ensure “we treat people fairly and with dignity and respect.”

Her extended family — including not just her parents but “grandparents on both sides, and aunts and uncles” — all worked in grocery stores, she said.

Her father, Sheldon Kushner, first owned a store in Iowa called KT Market. Later, he owned King Dollar in Lincoln, Iowa, where she worked as a teenager. One of her grandfathers owned a store in Council Bluffs, Iowa, called the White Front Market.

“I was born in the 1950s in a tiny little town in Iowa, where we were the only Jewish family and had my father’s grocery store,” Kushner said. “You learn from your folks and from your experience. I learned everything from being different and what that meant to be considered ‘other’ in a small community, … and I learned a lot about business watching my father work, and my grandparents.”

She learned from her father how a business should be run, including that it’s important to treat customers and employees well.

“During the debate about paid family medical leave, I thought a lot about my dad,” Kushner said. “There were a lot of claims during that debate in 2019 that somehow this would be difficult for small businesses. And I had the opposite reaction, because I knew my father had never fired someone who got sick with cancer, or who was going to have a baby, but he couldn’t afford to pay them when they were out on leave.”

She believes Connecticut’s paid leave law “was a great equalizer,” allowing small businesses to compete with big corporations that provided benefits small companies couldn’t.

“I think I was right,” she said. “I think it’s been proven that this has been something really good for small businesses.”

Open-minded legislator

Sanchez, 36, keeps a pair of white Crocs on the windowsill of his office in the Legislative Office Building in Hartford.

“He used to wear those to his office,” Sanchez says of the late Quentin “Q” Williams, a popular state representative from Middletown who died after a collision with a wrong-way driver on Route 9, following the first day of the 2023 legislative session. Williams was 39.

“They’re not his,” Sanchez says of the Crocs, but they are meant as a memorial.

“He was supposed to be co-chair of Labor, and he was really excited about the opportunity,” Sanchez said. “I was going to move on to other committee assignments.”

Instead, Sanchez agreed to assume the role at the request of House Speaker Matt Ritter (D-Hartford).

“Q would always tell me, ‘You don’t pass up on great opportunities and opportunities to serve the state,’” Sanchez said.

For a man who was born in Hartford, and raised there and in New Britain by his mother after his parents divorced, it was another impressive achievement.

It joined his earning a bachelor’s degree in urban and community planning from the University of Connecticut.

“I wasn’t a traditional student,” Sanchez said. “I got my degree at (age) 27.”

As a child, he had attended the Benjamin E. Mays Institute at Fox Middle School, a boy’s academy that provides mentors for adolescent Black males. There, his mentors included Sen. Douglas McCrory (D-Hartford) and state Rep. Bobby Gibson (D-Bloomfield).

“They were instrumental in my educational journey,” Sanchez said.

He attended high school at the Watkinson School in West Hartford. That was followed by working as an instructor at the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), the oldest employment and training program in New Britain.

“They took a chance on me, but they saw a skill set,” he said.

He eventually left OIC to work at Goodwin University in East Hartford, where he served as the employer relations coordinator. He also, at the age of 22, became a New Britain city councilman, a position he held for 10 years.

In January 2018, he was hired by the University of Hartford as a development officer, and in 2020, he was promoted to senior development officer.

Sanchez says his school and work experience have made him an open-minded legislator.

“I like to say that everybody is welcome to my table,” he said. “I never want to just take a one-sided view.”

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As for the idea that the committee should favor workers, he says he agrees, but only to a point. “If education takes up education issues, labor is labor related,” he said. “So, that literally has been my focus.”

He added, however, that the focus doesn’t eliminate his responsibility to talk to businesses to determine how bills could affect them.

“I think that’s also my responsibility to have those conversations,” he said.

‘A false premise’

There are those who disagree with the idea that the committee should be weighted toward labor.

That includes Chris DiPentima, president and CEO of the CBIA.

While he says his organization’s relationship with the Labor co-chairs over the past few years has been “as good as it ever has been in my five years at CBIA,” there is still a need to translate that into legislation that better balances supporting workers while growing the workforce and making the state more affordable.

DiPentima said neither the striking workers bill nor the warehouse bill, which would regulate the use of production quotas for warehouse workers, accomplish those goals.

“Warehouse businesses are growing,” DiPentima said. “It’s one of the top-growing businesses in Connecticut post-pandemic. So, why would we look to pass bills that would stymie that growth?”

Rep. Steve Weir (R-Hebron), a ranking Republican on the Labor Committee, also disagrees with the co-chairs about the committee’s mission.

“I think it’s a false premise,” he said of the need for legislation to be weighted toward workers. In fact, he believes Democrats on the committee generally push legislation that favors unionized workers.

“A lot of these concepts have nothing to do with the nonunion sector,” he said. “So, if we’re really being honest about what it means to protect employees, we would include all of them, not just certain ones that pay union dues.”

To make his point, he cited a comment that Senate President Pro Tem Martin M. Looney (D-New Haven) made about the warehouse bill during a Jan. 15 news conference about Senate Democrats’ top labor priorities for this session.

“Well, I think, clearly, if a union were in place, these practices would not be allowed to go on, and we hope at some point soon, unions will be in place,” Looney said. “And I think that in cases like this, it points out why unions are needed, but in the absence of that, when we see a real need and an abuse going on, in some circumstances we can’t wait for unionization, the state has to take action, as we hope to do now.”

“I think it sends a bad message that we’re going to hone in on an industry, and we’re going to target that industry,” Weir said.

“Obviously, the goal is to get these Amazon workers unionized,” he added. “If the Amazon workers want to be unionized, let them. We should not be encouraging or discouraging it.”

DiPentima agrees, saying unions in the state carry far more influence than they should.

He said unionized workers make up less than 20% of the state’s workforce, and less than 10% of the population.

In fact, according to a recent report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 16.5% of the state’s 1.634 million employed residents were union members in 2024, up from 15.9% in 2023.

“A lot of the pro-workplace bills that have been approved the past five or six years — including minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, captive audience — were intended to make Connecticut a more family-friendly place,” DiPentima said. “But it may also explain why over the past 12 months, Connecticut’s job growth was just 0.6%, which is 46th best in the country.”

He continued, “So, our job growth has been small and the legislation has not had the intended effect. They haven’t driven the people to Connecticut to grow the workforce.”