The House of Representatives voted Tuesday for an omnibus labor bill addressing wage theft in the building trades, hospital nursing staff standards, job protection for service workers, the safety of construction cranes, accommodations for breast-feeding mothers and compensation for workers assaulte d on the job. House Bill 5003, the subject of a Monday night rewrite, also would clarify the applicability of the minimum wage to cannabis workers and minor-league baseball players. (Growing and selling legal weed is covered by the minimum wage; playing baseball for or against the Hartford Yard Goats is not.) Not everything in the bill is strictly related to the wages, safety and comfort of working men and women. On pages 91 and 92 of the 119-page legislation, Section 64 permits the sale of lobsters in Connecticut that are too small under state standards but are legal to be caught elsewhere. How the bill was assembled, negotiated and revised from Thursday night until Tuesday offers insights into the influence of unions, the ability of a small Republican minority to shape legislation and a House culture open to a degree of compromise, or at least conversation, extinct in Washington. What was too controversial to call for a vote Monday night passed early Tuesday evening on a 117-29 vote. It now goes to the Senate for expected final passage before the General Assembly reaches the constitutional adjournment deadline of midnight May 6. “I think people want more from their governmental elected officials than constant bickering,” said House Speaker Matt Ritter, D-Hartford. The remark came during a discussion with reporters before the session Tuesday about what he hopes will be a bipartisan budget deal, but he acknowledged later it applies to his broader approach to running the House, a chamber his party controls with a super majority of 102-49. Ritter, who is in his third term as speaker, said there was no doubt the bill was going to pass. The only question was whether it would come with no input from Republicans, whose only option then would be to take advantage of the tradition of unlimited debate and talk for 10 hours or so. “Or you can buy into the culture, which is you work with people and make common-sense modifications,” Ritter said.  Ritter said the Democratic caucus is ideologically diverse, and some of its members were more comfortable voting for the bill after the revision. “Or you can try to make it better. And to me, it’s worth having a better feeling in the place,” Ritter said.  Ritter said Republicans helped “sharpen” the bill, an acknowledgement of the mistakes and ambiguities endemic to taking the contents of several individual bills and assembling them into a giant one. “The bill has taken a lot of twists and turns. We are probably at our sixth iteration since Friday and maybe fourth since yesterday,” said Rep. Steve Weir of Hebron, the ranking House Republican on the Labor and Public Employees Committee. On Monday, Weir was a firm “no” vote. On Tuesday, he voted for passage — as did half of the 48 Republicans who were present and voted. Five Democrats voted against the bill. House Minority Leader Vincent J. Candelora, R-North Branford, said Democrats accepted the removal or softening of provisions that Republicans said would have been punitive to businesses, including damages for employers that ran afoul of a state law encouraging transparency in wages and benefits. “To the extent that laws are being amended that impact industry, the speaker put people at the table to hear out their concerns and address their concerns. And I think when you’re at the table working on the process, you have a better appreciation for what is trying to be accomplished,” Candelora said. Candelora said Republicans also tried to protect small companies that build houses from wage theft penalties directed at subcontractors on larger projects who fail to pay their workers. He said he expected that most of the Republican opposition to the final version came from the failure to explicitly exempt them. The bill makes general contractors liable for the failure of subcontractors to meet their obligations to employees, and it allows workers or a construction union representing them to recover double damages in a civil lawsuit. It was a provision long sought by the Carpenters Union Local 326. Miguel A. Fuentes, the president of the union, said Congress should emulate the General Assembly’s willingness to negotiate and compromise. “If they did this in D.C., we’d be in better shape,” he said. Rep. Manny Sanchez, D-New Britain, co-chair of the Labor and Public Employees Committee, said the provision clarifying whether professional ballplayers were covered by the minimum wage law came at the request of labor and baseball. He said the AFL-CIO and Major League Baseball jointly asked for the language. The legislation also increases workers’ compensation benefits, under certain circumstances, from 75% to 100% of lost wages in cases involving workers who are assaulted while employed by health care or schools. Hospitals had filed public hearing testimony objecting to the bill as originally written, complaining it would establish unlimited benefits for workplace-related “assaults,” a term that was not clearly defined. Another section protects service workers from losing their jobs for 90 days after their company changes hands. ...read more read less