HARTFORD, CT — A bill clarifying the wage requirements for adult-use cannabis retail employees cleared a committee hurdle Tuesday with a 9-4 party-line vote.

House Bill 6842 establishes that “any employer who pays or agrees to pay to an employee less than the minimum fair wage or overtime wage shall be deemed in violation” of state statute.

Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, said the bill also would prohibit the labor commissioner from counting tips as part of employees’ wages.

Restaurant and hotel employees who receive tips currently can be paid below the state’s minimum wage of $16.35 per hour. Restaurant and hotel employees can be paid $6.38 per hour, and bartenders who customarily receive tips can be paid $8.23, according to the labor department.

Republican state Rep. Joe Canino of Torrington, though, expressed concern that the proposal contained no allowance for a cannabis company to become a tipped establishment, including operating as a cannabis cafe.

“The staff might agree a tipped model might be more beneficial (in a cafe or restaurant model),” Canino said. “They should have that type of flexibility to engage in a compensation model that employees agreed to. I would like there to be an avenue for a company to … demonstrate that their employees are receiving an appropriate amount of tips to get them to that wage?”

Kushner clarified that the revisions to the statute currently do not convey the ability to apply for a tip credit, and that the revision does not change that.

That being the case, Sen. Rob Sampson, R-Wolcott, wondered why the committee was debating the bill at all.

“I was under the understanding that this was going on somewhere in our state?” he said.

When Kushner replied that an establishment had been paying its employees below the minimum wage, Sampson asked if that establishment had been found in violation. When he learned they had been, he returned to his original comment, asking if Kushner could “explain why this is a necessity if that occurred?”

“This will make the cannabis law very clear, and hopefully that will prevent any establishment from taking that step … which caused workers to be underpaid for months,” Kushner said.

But were the workers truly underpaid, Sampson asked, if their total compensation, including tips, exceeded the state minimum?

Kushner was adamant, repeating that the workers “did not receive the minimum wage they were entitled to under our statute” and therefore were underpaid.