By Doug Belden

St. Paul Pioneer Press

ST. PAUL — Although Minnesota Senate negotiators matched their efforts to raise the state’s minimum wage to $9.50 an hour for large employers, House conference committee members Monday rejected the overture over the details.

The talks, though, presented the first big movement between DFLers in the two houses toward a compromise on the size of the raise.

The Senate offer had a few catches: The rate would begin in 2016 instead of 2015, and senators were unwilling to talk about any of the other issues in the bill until House members voted on the wage proposal.

That was too much uncertainty for the House delegation, which called for two recesses to consider the proposal and tried to amend it, without success.

“Usually, every concession has a price,” said Rep. Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, who is leading the three-member House team.

Without knowing whether the Senate is planning to support an annual inflation adjustment, it’s hard for the House to evaluate whether delaying a year is a big deal or not, Winkler said. “I actually think it does make a difference.”

He offered an amendment that would accept the delay till 2016 but lock in the inflation adjustment starting in 2017. That was rejected by the three senators.

Hayden’s amendment to push the $9.50 rate off till 2016 was then shot down by the House members.

Sen. Chris Eaton, DFL-Brooklyn Center, appeared miffed at the House resistance after what she said was a difficult slog in the Senate to get to $9.50 from $7.75, which was the rate the Senate passed last session.

“If we can’t agree on your own language, I don’t know what else we can do tonight,” Eaton told Winkler.

Eaton said after the meeting that the next step is up to Winkler. “I thought it was a pretty generous offer,” she said.

Winkler said he wasn’t sure whether he and his fellow House members would try to craft a global offer to present to senators.

“The Senate wanted to take one discrete piece of the bill and try to move on that rather than look at the whole. We’ll try to look at what our options are,” he said.

The six-member conference committee, all Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party members, is charged with coming up with a compromise that would be submitted to each chamber for an up-or-down vote, no floor amendments allowed.

It’s the same six members who were appointed last May to hash out a compromise between the House and Senate bills but failed to do so.

Monday’s choppy start shows divisions on the minimum wage are strong within the DFL majority just as they are between the DFLers and Republicans. Both the House and Senate are controlled by DFLers.

DFL Gov. Mark Dayton has said he supports an increase to $9.50.

Sen. Jeff Hayden of Minneapolis said his caucus members want extra time for business owners to be able to phase in the increase. He also suggested $9.50 might be a one-day only offer.

“Tomorrow is another day,” Hayden said.

The House proposal contains more provisions than the Senate’s.

It would change the threshold between large and small employers to $500,000 instead of $625,000. Currently, large employers in Minnesota pay $6.15 per hour and small employers pay $5.25. In practice, most pay the federal minimum wage of $7.25.

The House bill would increase the minimum wage rate each year by at most 2.5 percent, reduce the number of hours required before overtime kicks in and increase parental leave from six to 12 weeks.

“This was an interesting evening,” said Shar Knutson, president of the Minnesota AFL-CIO, after the meeting broke up.

“I think that they need to get together and look at the whole thing. That’s how you get a good bill,” she said. “You don’t pick one thing and then go to the next thing, because someone is going to object to that.”