Bills to relax child labor laws, cut SNAP benefits stall in Senate committee

It’s not often that Republican-sponsored bills in Kentucky’s legislature get voted down in committee.

Even more rare: Two such bills were denied committee approval by a majority GOP committee Thursday.

House Bill 255, which would relax certain child labor laws to expand the hours that 16- and 17-year-olds can work during school weeks, received five yes votes in the Senate Committee on Economic Development, Tourism and Labor. Six votes were needed for it to advance.

Moments later, House Bill 367 suffered the same fate. That measure would change food stamp eligibility for able-bodied adults in a way that proponents say closes abused loopholes, but food security advocates warn will take SNAP benefits away from people who need them.

The bills may not be totally dead and gone, though.

Committee chairman Sen. Max Wise, R-Campbellsville, said a special called committee meeting for Friday could revive both bills. They’re not currently on the agenda, Wise said, but he told the Herald-Leader he would “talk to both bill sponsors and to see what they wish to do.”

Late Thursday afternoon, an agenda for the meeting showed that House Bill 255 would be reconsidered by the committee but House Bill 367 would not.

Both bills underwent some amount of change in committee substitutes presented Thursday.

House Bill 255 still repeals the limit on children working no more than six hours a day and 30 hours a week during school weeks and prohibits state labor officials from setting child labor regulations that exceed minimum federal protections.

However, the committee substitute tweaked the original bill to reinstate a ban on 16- and 17-year olds from working between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.

The latest version of House Bill 367 was pared down in the committee sub presented by sponsor Rep. Wade Williams, R-Earlington. Gone is the requirement for able-bodied adults on or applying for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits to prove their total assets are below $2,750 in order to legally access that assistance.

However, the bill retains language that bars the Cabinet for Health and Family Services’ ability to waive work requirements and loosen SNAP eligibility standards for economically distressed counties and for the whole state if unemployment rises to 10% or higher.

Dustin Pugel, a senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, said the existing language still leaves 16,000 adults at-risk of losing food assistance immediately.

Among a group of Kentuckians in attendance at the committee to push back against House Bill 367 was Nicki Stacey, president of the Hazel Green Food Project, a food bank in eastern Wolfe County.

“You can’t be pro-life if you’re going to starve them once they’re here,” Stacy told the Herald-Leader.

The lines at Stacy’s food bank often leak out all the way onto the nearby Mountain Parkway.

She said many of those who use the food bank services in her Eastern Kentucky county don’t have the time to navigate the paperwork that would be required to “prove they’re poor enough” for food stamps should the House Bill 367 get passed.

While Democrats’ and others’ criticisms of both bills have been well-documented, the pushback from Republicans in committee was new.

“I probably shouldn’t have had a lot of the jobs I had when I was growing up, being able to drive equipment before I was 16, hay baling work and different things like paper routes before six in the morning. I guess I just don’t quite understand it,” Wilson said when explaining his no vote on House Bill 255

The two other Republicans who joined the committee’s two Democrats in voting no on that bill said that they could change their mind later in the legislative process.

As for House Bill 367, some Republicans were straightforward in their displeasure.

Four Republicans on the committee voted no for the bill. Sen. Jason Howell, R-Murray, said the bill “flies in the face” of work the General Assembly has undertaken to address the “benefits cliff” issues that disincentivize earnings increases.

“It places another wedge between people who are working and are trying to do what is best for them and what we want them to do policy-wise for the commonwealth,” Howell said.

“It throws another wedge in there to keep them down in a lower economic demographic, keeps them from being able to build any well to build any assets. It broadens a cliff that they have to jump over and drag their families over.”

Senate President Robert Stivers, R-Manchester, said that the result was “part of the process” in the legislature. He didn’t discount the potential for either to be revived and eventually pass the Senate.