On Labor Day, 2020 a bony $7.25 per hour remains the pay for New Hampshire’s 12,000 minimum-wage earners – https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2019/home.htm. That’s because on July 24, Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed an increase in the minimum wage, which hasn’t budged in 11 years – https://www.minimum-wage.org/new-hampshire.

Any sentient citizen knows subsisting on $7.25 per hour is preposterous. See https://livingwage.mit.edu/states/33; https://www.epi.org/resources/budget.

We also know Gov. Sununu doesn’t mind raises. On taking office in 2017, his salary was $123,874.70. It jumped to $133,587.22 in 2018, then $143,002.36 in 2019 – https://business.nh.gov/paytransparency. The governor: three years, three raises. Minimum wage workers: 11 years, zero raises.

What drives such indifference to the working poor’s plight? Maybe it’s fealty to the classic GOP plot line: help the affluent and powerful prosper, leave the (working) poor and uninfluential eating cake. Despite America’s extant “pandemic” of income inequality, rather than use his good offices to help New Hampshire’s minimum wage workers, the Governor is appropriating the Trump playbook, basically saying “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Instead of offering minimum wage workers a hand up, acknowledging the inherent dignity of their efforts, the Governor seems in tune with the cynical GOP philosophy of disdaining the working poor, whose safety net his party has spent years methodically shredding. Rather than demand employers pay living wages to minimize the need for State public assistance, the Governor tacitly supports this form of corporate welfare.

Nelson Mandela said, “A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Our regressive governor merits an F.