Although a bill that would have forced insurers to raise Massachusetts’ lowest-in-the-nation auto body labor rate failed to make it into law this year, supporters are expecting the issue to be brought up again in the 2023 legislative session.
The labor rate bill was one of more than 100 outside sections that had been attached to the $3.76 billion economic development bill, all of which were stripped from the final legislation by a House-Senate conference committee.
“This was not an indictment against the language in section 110 or our original bill,” Evangelos “Lucky” Papageorg, executive director of the Alliance of Automotive Service Providers of Massachusetts (AASP-MA), told Repairer Driven News. According to legislators, “the conference committee felt that in order to move the ball in a timely fashion, they could not address all of the outside sections,” he said.