Connecticut House Debates Requiring Sick Pay

The Connecticut House of Representatives debated late into Friday night as members considered a bill that would make Connecticut the nation’s first state to mandate that some employers provide paid sick days to employees.

The State Senate approved the bill on May 25 in an 18-to-17 vote, with one Republican voting in favor and five Democrats opposed.

The House has 52 Republicans and 99 Democrats. None of the Republicans are considered likely to approve the measure, but party officials concede that getting enough Democratic votes to kill it would be a challenge. The Republicans on Friday had drawn up about 100 amendments and were promising a contentious and protracted debate.

The issue is being closely followed nationally, as liberal groups have presented similar legislation in other states and cities. The bill would require only service companies with 50 or more workers to provide paid sick days.

The measure was significantly toned down from earlier versions, but opponents raised the same objections, that the bill was antibusiness and counterproductive at a time of high unemployment and low job creation in a state that has consistently lagged behind the nation in creating jobs. Proponents said it offered major and overdue protections for workers and for the public health, particularly at a time when workers’ rights were under attack.

Manufacturing companies and nationally chartered nonprofit organizations would be exempt. The bill would not cover day laborers or temporary workers. It would apply only to service workers, a broad category that includes waiters, cashiers, crossing guards and hairstylists. The proposal would allow each covered employee to earn one hour of paid sick time for every 40 hours worked, with the number of days capped at five a year.

The legislation has been a major priority for Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who lobbied wavering senators to support the bill. He has pledged to sign the bill if it reaches his desk. Mr. Malloy, who is in his first term, made the issue an important part of his platform during his campaign against Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary last year.

“This piece of legislation is a reasonable compromise that represents good public policy,” he said in a statement after the Senate passed it. “It exempts industries where appropriate, it ensures that the benefit won’t be abused, and most importantly, it protects public health. It shouldn’t be the case that people who are frontline service workers — people who serve us food, who care for our children and who work in hospitals, for example — are forced to go to work sick to keep their jobs.”

But Republicans said the bill was onerous and ill timed. They said that it would put an excessive burden on companies that had to provide paid sick days and that its language provided a broad cause of action for any employees who claimed their employment was unfairly affected by using paid sick days.

The Senate Republican leader, John McKinney, said the bill would give other states one more argument in competing for companies and jobs, but he seemed resigned to House passage.

Assuming it passes, he said, “by being the first state in the nation to pass a paid sick leave mandate, Connecticut has further cemented its reputation as being an unfriendly place to do business.”

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Golden Age for Older Women At Highest Levels of the Game

“I’m not old,” she said. “Why do you think I’m old?”

Well, in tennis years, at least, Li is old. She is 29. And her opponent in the final, Francesca Schiavone of Italy, is even older. Schiavone was 29 when she won here a year ago, becoming the oldest first-time women’s Grand Slam winner since professionals began competing in 1968.

The Li-Schiavone final captures a shift that is under way in women’s tennis. The days of child stars like Tracy Austin, Monica Seles and Jennifer Capriati appear to be in the past. The top players are getting older.

For a record sixth major in a row, each finalist is at least 25.

With a combined age of 60 years 79 days, Li and Schiavone make up the oldest French Open final pairing since 1986, when Chris Evert beat Martina Navratilova (61 years 37 days combined). They are the fifth oldest pairing in any Grand Slam women’s final.

Now, they are placed in the odd position of having to explain, if not defend, why older players are dominating the biggest events in a sport long recognized for its teenage sensations. No matter who wins, the average age of the women’s winner of the last 12 Grand Slam tournaments will be close to 28.

“Age just paper,” said Li, seeded sixth and trying to become the first player from Asia, man or woman, to win a Grand Slam event. “It’s just plus one.”

Schiavone, who speaks with a flair and imagination that accent her game, has faced the questions two years in a row. Last year she was seeded 17th. She is fifth this time.

“Is like the wine,” she said. “Stay in the bottle more is much, much better.”

Navratilova, 54, has watched the re-emergence of the older set. “You will see players excelling more between the ages of 25 and 30 than from 20 to 25,” she said Friday. “Everything’s getting older, and the players take a little bit longer to mature, perhaps. I don’t know how much of it has to do with the sport, and how much has to do with the setup.”

Physically, players of all ages are stronger than ever in a game now dominated by big-hitting baseliners. Even the sturdiest of teenage players struggle against veterans who have made fitness a years-long priority.

Mentally, experienced players are accustomed to the grind of the travel and the pressure of the big tournaments. Younger players are surrounded by entourages — families, coaches, trainers — designed to make them better. Navratilova wondered if that is not the case.

“They don’t have to mature because they don’t have to fend for themselves,” Navratilova said. “I was flying around the world by myself when I was 17 years old, booking everything myself. Getting myself to and from airports and cities and practices and all that. I didn’t have a coach until I was 25, and that teaches you have to be self-reliant.”

The last teenager to win a Grand Slam was Maria Sharapova, who was 19 when she won the 2006 United States Open. Before that, tennis was lined with teenage champions. Now, it is at least as likely that Grand Slam winners will be over 30 as under 20.

“It’ll level off somewhere,” Navratilova said. “I don’t think you’ll see people win Slams at 35, but 30 is not the cutoff point that it used to be.”

When Evert defeated Navratilova at Roland Garros 25 years ago, Evert won the 18th and final Grand Slam singles title of her career. Navratilova had 13, on her way to 18.

They dominated women’s tennis for much of a decade. That they remain the second-oldest singles pairing in women’s Grand Slam history (trailing Virginia Wade and Betty Stove, an even 64 years combined, at the 1977 Wimbledon) speaks to their career longevity. They were young stars once, too, occasionally and finally relenting to others, like Austin, Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Capriati, the Williamses, Martina Hingis and Sharapova.

The women’s tour implemented age-eligibility restrictions in the mid-1990’s, including a rule that prohibits players younger than 14 from competing on the tour.

Li did not play her first major tournament until she was 22, and her rise through the rankings was steady and slow, until she could not be ignored. Now on her way to the top five, her ranking has climbed four years in a row, all since her mid-20s.

Schiavone, who will turn 31 on June 23, spent most of her 20s ranked in the top 40 but was seen as a small, 5-foot-5 all-court throwback stuck in the wrong era. Still, Navratilova told Schiavone years ago that she was good enough to win a Grand Slam.

She did not reach the semifinals of one until last year’s French Open romp.

“Francesca could have been better earlier,” Navratilova said. “I think she just didn’t believe in herself that much. Then she finally realized, yeah, I can play with the best of them. Now you can’t stop her. You need a bloody bulldozer to hold her back.”

Li and Schiavone might represent the making of a trend toward older players, but they are still relative anomalies.

Serena Williams (5 major victories in the last 12 tournaments), Clijsters (3) and Venus Williams (1) and Svetlana Kuznetsova (1) all won Grand Slam events under the age of 25, too. They did not need all those years to mature into great players.

But they have crowded out the rest of the field, like the current No. 1, Caroline Wozniacki, a 20-year-old Dane.

The true test of the trend will come over the next 12 events, or the 12 after that, if and when the Williams sisters and Clijsters retire for good. Maybe that will create the room for younger stars like Wozniacki, Victoria Azarenka and others to show that youth can prevail again.

Of course, they will be older, too. But not old.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 3, 2011

An earlier caption for the photo in this article incorrectly identified the tennis player on the right. Her name is Li Na, not Na Li.

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St. Ann’s Warehouse Scrambles to Find New Home

St. Ann’s Warehouse, the Brooklyn theater whose versatile and cavernous playing space has become a magnet for New York and overseas acting troupes, is now confronting a likely fate that its leaders had worked years to avoid: homelessness.

Scheduled to lose its 14,000-square-foot home next May because of commercial development, St. Ann’s thought its long-term future was secure after the Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation approved the theater’s plans to move across the street after renovating the old Tobacco Warehouse on the Dumbo neighborhood’s waterfront. But some Brooklyn civic groups oppose handing over that landmark ruin — a shell of a 19th-century building, mainly walls but no roof — to any single organization, and in April the groups won a court decision on a technical issue that probably will preserve the Tobacco Warehouse as an open neighborhood site for the next few years, at least.

All of this leaves St. Ann’s with little more than an inch-thick prospectus of ambitious artistic dreams: its submission to the park corporation, titled “The Future Tobacco Warehouse: Where Global, Regional and Local Communities Converge.” That appendices-stuffed proposal included maps for a 7,000-square-foot public garden and a 2,100-square-foot community hall intended to house some of the concerts and dance presentations that are now held intermittently at the Tobacco Warehouse.

The proposal’s centerpiece was a 10,250-square-foot theater that would have sustained St. Ann’s reputation as a rare New York City space that allows ensembles to configure a high-ceilinged, column-free and technically sophisticated room to their needs. Among the renowned companies that have played St. Ann’s in recent years are Kneehigh Theater from England (“Brief Encounter”), the National Theater of Scotland (the Iraq war play “Black Watch”) and the downtown Wooster Group (“The Emperor Jones”).

After the artistic staff and board members of St. Ann’s fixed their sights last year on the Tobacco Warehouse, they gave up developing a Plan B for a future home. Like other arts organizations in New York recently — the theater company Performance Space 122 and New York City Opera among them — St. Ann’s is facing a nomadic future until a permanent site can be found or a new home can be built, options that could take years.

“Our vision was to turn the Brooklyn waterfront into a cultural center by transforming the Tobacco Warehouse into both a theater and a public arts space,” said Susan Feldman, artistic director of St. Ann’s. “It leaves us maybe having to leave Dumbo. Perhaps even leaving Brooklyn. None of us want that, but the theater we do at St. Ann’s doesn’t easily fit into pre-existing spaces that we’ve seen, and we want to continue to do that work.”

Ms. Feldman founded Arts at St. Ann’s in 1979 at a historic church site in Brooklyn Heights, then opened its current home in an old spice-milling factory in 2001. The owner of the space is now developing it, with plans to construct an apartment complex and a middle school. Well known as a blunt-speaking, strong-willed artistic programmer, Ms. Feldman did not self-edit at first in discussing the opposition to St. Ann’s plans.

“When we won approval to move into the Tobacco Warehouse, you had a few people in Brooklyn who felt such defeat and anger that they are now fighting all-out to keep this space as a ruin, an urban ruin,” Ms. Feldman said. After a pause, she spoke a bit more diplomatically: “Well, I know everyone is fighting for what they believe in. I can respect that. We’re just heartbroken. And a little desperate.”

Jim Walden, a lawyer for the Brooklyn Heights Association and others fighting to keep the Tobacco Warehouse as is, said the neighborhood groups admired the work of St. Ann’s and supported keeping the theater in Dumbo. At the same time, the groups wanted to maintain the Tobacco Warehouse as the kind of site that has featured photo and art exhibitions, hip-hop and food festivals, and even a memorable “Macbeth,” presented by St. Ann’s in 2008 on a two-story, roofless set.

“We don’t think it’s a good idea for governments to just give away national landmarks to organizations that they like, if those are good organizations, because eventually there will be a person in charge who is giving landmarks to an organization that you don’t like,” Mr. Walden said. “What you need is the same standardized process that has integrity and is followed in all decisions like this.”

In April a federal judge ruled that the National Park Service broke the law when it redrew the lines of the old Empire Fulton Ferry State Park without public hearings — a process that led to the Tobacco Warehouse and another building’s being left outside of the park’s borders. (The Empire Fulton Ferry State Park has since been subsumed by Brooklyn Bridge Park.) The park service and New York City, defendants in the case, argued that the two buildings had been put within those borders by mistake, and that neither building was eligible for inclusion in the parkland, anyway, because they were not suitable for outdoor recreation.

But the judge, Eric N. Vitaliano, found evidence that the two structures were intentionally included in the park map early on, and ruled — in favor of Brooklyn neighborhood groups and others — that the proper process was not followed.

Regina Myer, president of Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation, said that the Tobacco Warehouse is now used less frequently for recreation than other parts of the park, and that St. Ann’s proposal “was far and away the most exciting we received, and had so many opportunities for neighborhood groups and arts organizations to continue using the space.”

During a recent interview Ms. Feldman leafed through her prospectus and read aloud from the two dozen letters of support from Brooklyn cultural and arts groups for St. Ann’s occupying the Tobacco Warehouse. Almost lovingly, she traced her fingers over the outlines of the maps for the renovated space, including diagrams of how different acting troupes had each reconfigured the open floor plan of the current theater.

“There is something so special, we found, in having this sort of warehouse space that can be refashioned with every production to suit a different artist’s dream,” she said. “We could have made that work at the Tobacco Warehouse. It would have worked so well. And now you just feel hopeless.”

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