Screenshot of Republican Sen. Matt Pouliot from a campaign video. | Facebook
Reposted from the Maine Beacon
Two Republican state lawmakers compared a legislative effort to increase penalties on employers who violate Maine’s labor laws to racial profiling and surveillance by the Gestapo, the secret police of Nazi Germany.
Sen. Matthew Pouliot (R-Kennebec County) and Rep. Gary Drinkwater (R-Milford) made the comments in a legislative committee hearing on Feb. 15 in response to a review of the Chapter 9 rules that govern financial penalties that the Bureau of Labor Standards (BLS) can assess on businesses found to be in violation of the law.
In a work session held by the legislature’s Labor and Housing Committee, Pouliot alleged that new BLS director Jason Moyer-Lee is biased against employers.
“He just really seemed gleeful that he was going to be empowered to go after people now,” Pouliot said of Moyer-Lee. “It is concerning that we may pass legislation which would really empower individuals to kind of act like the Gestapo and go after people.”
The bill, LD 2184, would allow BLS to update penalty amounts, while accounting for employer size, track record and the gravity of violations. Currently, penalties are so low that BLS officials say they provide little deterrence to breaking the law. In 2022 and 2023, on average, BLS collected $3.80 per violation.
“Under the current Chapter 9 rules, the penalty calculation starts with the minimum allowable penalty that a court could award under the statute, and then may increase the penalty for various reasons,” Moyer-Lee explained in a public hearing earlier this month. “This means that fines — even for serious violations — tend to be very low, and much lower than is required by statute.”
LD 2184 would flip things around so penalties start at the highest instead of the lowest.
Prior to stepping into his role as BLS director, Moyer-Lee was a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor and a general secretary of the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain.
Labor and Housing Committee chair Sen. Mike Tipping (D-Orono) reminded Pouliot to not assume motives of people who have testified before the committee and to not use inflammatory language.
Pouliot owns real estate, property management and advertising businesses. He further alleged that labor unions had a “stranglehold” on the Democratic-majority Labor and Housing Committee.
Moments later, Drinkwater, a retired car dealer, claimed Moyer-Lee would single out specific industries. An aspect of the enforcement updates under consideration would allow BLS officials to proactively investigate sectors where there is a track record of labor violations. Drinkwater equated that to racial profiling.
“To me, that says profiling,” Drinkwater told the committee. “We have taken a stand in the states to say profiling is illegal.”
Tipping, who founded Beacon in 2015, told Drinkwater that it is illegal to profile protected classes of people, based on racial, ethnic, religious reasons, but it is not illegal to proactively investigate areas where laws are likely to be broken.
“There are police checks on sobriety around concerts. That is not illegal profiling,” Tipping told Drinkwater. “And I think those kinds of references are not helpful to this conversation.”
Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.
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