Yeah this is the thing. When this last came around I was SO in favor of MaiD because it made sense and the slippery slope arguments all seemed kind of silly.

And then Canada did it and just like skiied all the way down to the bottom of that slippery slope. Every thing the anti MaiD guys were saying was going to happen happened. People being pressured into choosing MaiD to avoid healthcare costs, people who can’t consent getting forced into MaiD, literal commercials for MaiD. It seems to be too much.

I have no issue with it from a moral perspective, and think it’s a choice I’d want to make in certain situations but idk man. The externalities seem bad, and Canada is usually better than the US at these these things.

This may seem like the wrong answer but it is 100000% the right answer and is very underrated. Your congressman/woman has a constituent services department and their whole point is to chase down the federal government on things like this and they WILL help. Had an issue like this with my wife where USCIS just lost her application for citizenship. They got it found within a week or so.

I’d also ping markey’s office, though the rep will probably be more responsive. Warrens office isn’t very helpful on these.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. A lot of pretty progressive ballot initiatives have ended up losing when everyone thought they’d win, and the ballot initiative process has also been used to enact some pretty conservative stuff (e.g. constitutional amendment banning rent control in 1994).

Yes all 8 republicans in the MA legislature did this.

…most of them didn’t have time and a half pay on Sundays to begin with. That’s a pretty MA specific thing.

The other point here is what was possible at the time. You have to remember that while we are a pretty progressive state overall we still elected Charlie Baker twice and would have done so again had he run. There is a level of “too progressive” at which point the average MA voter does get annoyed. The bargain that was struck was what could pass, and all in all it was a good bargain and one of the highest minimum wage increases in the country.

At the end of the day the politicians have to account for the will of the voters, and in MA we have a pretty good progressive base. But there are limits. This was a good deal, I’ll take the W.

Well okay first of all that statement is just false. The minimum wage went up in like 2014 or so. Inflation this year has been pretty bad at around 8% but inflation from 2014 has NOT been 80%. $15 now is just factually more than $8 in 2014 when you adjust for inflation. You can look at the CPI statistics to clearly see this.

But it’s a separate issue because the issue of “what should the minimum wage be” is separate from “should you get paid more on Sundays just because it’s Sunday.” It makes perfect sense to me to say that the minimum wage should be higher in order to account for inflation. It makes NO sense to me to say that minimum wage should be higher on Sundays and not other days in order to account for inflation. My point here is that Sundays are not special, and the inflation rate does not make Sundays any more or less special. It is simply a separate issue.

So minimum wage was $8.10 an hour. Time and a half on Sundays was $12.15 an hour. The minimum wage is now $15. That was the bargain — it goes up for everyone, by a lot (almost 100%!), and in exchange we don’t do time and a half. Like I said elsewhere, it totally makes sense to peg the minimum wage increase to inflation like they do in Washington state.

Ok hear me out. What if, instead of doing a weird time and a half thing on Sundays they simply raised the minimum wage on every day of the week to a level well above what time and a half was. Oh wait, that’s literally exactly what they did.

God, these people have the logical faculties of republicans. Arguing with them is like arguing with a particularly silly brick wall.

Idk about you but I’d much rather work on Sunday than on Saturday.

Mhmmm so guess I’m not missing the point, you just like being argumentative. Got it.

Time and a half was always a bad policy. This isn’t 1890, we don’t go to church on Sundays anymore. Minimum wage increase are good and I’m in support of them, just not on one random day of the week.

I mean, yes? I’d be totally down to peg the minimum wage to inflation. But adding time and a half on Sundays is def not the way to deal with it.

How so?

I’d rather them increase the minimum wage every day by an amount that makes it equal than to increase it by a lot on Sundays. If it’s ever a question of going back to time and a half on Sundays, why wouldn’t we just spread that increase out among the rest of the week so that everyone gets it.

Well yeah but that’s a separate issue.

This is literally the answer. And it’s clearly better to have $15 every day than to have $12.15 once a week.

They didn’t sneak it in, it was a deal. The minimum wage was 8.10 an hour, with time and a half at 12.15 on Sundays and holidays. The deal was that minimum wage would be raised to $15 over the course of 4 years and the time and a half for Sundays would go away. You might argue they should have done both, which fine I don’t disagree.

But if a compromise was needed, this was a pretty good one. I remember having to fight over Sunday shifts for that extra cash. Now you just earn more than you ever did back then on any day of the week.

Not to be pedantic but the population of the entire country is like half that of Boston proper, not even considering Cambridge Somerville etc.