Voters who closely follow the Democratic primary for governor will likely know that Ned Lamont opposes the legislature's paid sick leave bill: the proposal to mandate that employers with 50 workers or more provide them paid time off when they're ill.

But Lamont's position, a key policy difference with his intra-party rival Dan Malloy, is not as clear-cut as it has sometimes sounded.

In response to a questionnaire from the Working Families Party, the key backers of the bill for the past several years, Lamont said that he would sign one version of the sick leave proposal, the one that limited the mandate to "service workers."

But in many public appearances and interviews, Lamont has seemed to suggest categorical rejection of a state law mandating sick leave for workers, while saying he could support a federal version of the law, which he believes would provide the sick leave without creating competitive disadvantages among individual states.

When a listener called in to ask about the topic during Lamont's Friday morning appearance on WNPR's "Where We Live," the candidate said he'd support a mandate "at the national level."

"I support what Rosa and Chris Dodd are trying to do," Lamont said, referring to U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, and the state's senior senator, "not something that puts Connecticut at a disadvantage with the first state in the country to have a mandate like this."

After a follow-up question, Lamont said: "Again, on a national level I think it makes a fair amount of sense. To do it right now in the middle of this knee-knocking recession when small businesses are hardly keeping their head above water … is it a priority for me? No."

Lamont had a more forceful answer in an interview with the Connecticut Mirror in February, as he jumped into the governor's race.

"I think we deal with sick leave just fine at the small-business level where I live," Lamont told the Mirror. "I'm not sure I need the government stepping in and putting another mandate on businesses like mine."

But on the Working Families Party questionnaire, Lamont checked a box saying he "would sign this legislation," adding a line to specify that he would only sign a version that mirrors a version put forward by state Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, during the last legislative session.

That version would apply the mandate for sick leave only to service sector workers and only for companies with more than 50 employees.

Lamont has said repeatedly that "if something like what Edith Prague put forward came across his desk, he wouldn't veto it," said Justine Sessions, a spokeswoman for the Lamont campaign.

But if Lamont's support has been there, it hasn't seemed very vocal to leaders of the Working Families Party, which has worked for several years to try to convince a deeply opposed business lobby that mandating sick leave for workers will improve worker health and productivity, and that it won't prove an onerous burden on employers.

Hours after Lamont's WNPR appearance on Friday, Jon Green, the party's state director, e-mailed some party members about the answer Lamont gave. In the e-mail, obtained by The Day, Green wrote, "Unfortunately, Ned's public statements still differ fairly dramatically with the position he articulated to the WFP on his questionnaire."

Green suggested that the party conduct a conference call this week "to discuss what to do about this."