07/20/2006
CONTACT: Martyn Hopper or Michael Shaw, (916) 448-9904
or Tony Malandra, (415) 608-8843
Baltimore judge's toss of state's Wal-Mart law imperils Senate Bill 1414 here
SACRAMENTO, Calif.—A federal district judge's ruling yesterday in Baltimore, Md., has a profound impact on a Senate bill working its way through the Legislature here in California.
"At its core, U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz's decision yesterday in Baltimore made it illegal for lawmakers anywhere to put out a contract hit on one employer and re-established the importance of nipping such conduct in the bud before it can spread to every other business," said Martyn Hopper, state director for California's largest small-business group, the 35,000-member NFIB.
Maryland became the first state in the union last year to require businesses with more than 10,000 employees to dedicate 8 percent of their payroll to health care or pay an equivalent amount to the state. Lawmakers there also did it in rather dramatic fashion, overriding a governor's veto. Senate Bill 1414 here essentially apes the former Maryland law. It has already passed the State Senate, 22–15, and is now in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
Only one company was subject to the Maryland law, however, and that became part of its undoing. In ruling that Wal-Mart "faces threatened injury" from forcing the company to allocate benefits for Maryland employees in a different way from other states, the judge found the law in violation of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). The NFIB Legal Foundation filed an amicus brief in the case, which was brought by Retail Industry Leaders Association.
"Our gripe with the Maryland law is the same as it is with Senate Bill 1414: it will not stop at just big business," said Hopper, "and that was proved when proponents of Maryland's so-called Fair Share Health Care law came back this year and sought to expand it to include all businesses of whatever size. We saw their promises then to limit it to just big businesses as the lie it was, just as we see the falseness surrounding Senate Bill 1414 now."
Hopper said the affordability of health care has been the No. 1 issue for small-business owners for almost the past 20 years, which is why less than half of them can afford it, as opposed to 99 percent of big businesses which offer their employees medical coverage.
"Small-business owners are offering real answers to the problem, but lawmakers in both Congress and in Sacramento have chosen instead to let putative advocates from ersatz non-profit groups prevail, and do so by insidiously setting up Wal-Mart as a bogeyman. Judge Motz put a stop to that, yesterday, and we applaud him for it. We await Senator Migden's call and express our desire to work with her on finding real solutions to the problem," said Hopper in reference to the Senate Bill 1414's author.
