NH AFL-CIO Backs Candidates Who Take 'Working Families' Pledge

The New Hampshire AFL-CIO is endorsing 148 state representative, 22 state Senate and three Executive Council candidates as part of a “working families” pledge the union asked candidates to endorse.

The union held a press conference at the Legislative Office Building on Sept. 17, to outline what it was asking of candidates, including raising the minimum wage, ensuring equal pay for equal work, investing in public education, making college more affordable, and protections to the middle class and jobs, including preserving collective bargaining rights and standing against right-to-work legislation.

Previously, the AFL-CIO endorsed all the Democratic incumbents running for statewide and federal offices.

“I want to make sure that people know that the labor movement is alive and well in the state of New Hampshire,” said Mark MacKenzie, the president of the AFL-CIO. “We shall not be moved backwards by those forces or those people who believe that the labor movement somehow interrupts the business community in this state … together, we will move ahead and make this state a better place to live and work in the coming weeks and years.”

State Rep. Steve Shurtleff, D-Concord, who is jockeying to become the next Speaker of the House, said he was proud, as a former union member and president of a local, to stand with the AFL-CIO and take the pledge. He added that Democrats, with the help of organized labor, were able to beat back right-to-work legislation when state Rep. William O’Brien, R-Mont Vernon, was the Speaker of the House in the 2011-2012 session.

“We will never pass right-to-work in New Hampshire,” Shurtleff said to cheers in the hall.

MacKenzie said the pledge wasn’t about specific legislation around the minimum wage or right-to-work that had been filed but an overall values statement about moving the state forward and improving the lives of families. He said the union had its legislative committee analyze votes on bills and send out a questionnaire to all the candidates. The union then compiled all the data to create a score for each elected official and candidate.

MacKenzie was asked if there were Republicans on the list and he said there were legislative candidates but didn’t know exactly how many. Every Republican candidate was invited to participate in the pledge, he said.

When asked about his “unrealistic” statement never passing right-to-work legislation when it had already been approved in the past, Shurtleff said it wouldn’t because the Democrats would hold a majority in the House and Gov. Maggie Hassan would be re-elected.

When asked about a baseline for the minimum wage, Shurtleff said there were “several numbers that had been talked about” but nothing specific while adding that any increase would be an improvement over the status quo.

“It’s something that we may work with our friends across the aisle to find something that they would be comfortable with,” he added, “to make it bipartisan legislation.”

MacKenzie said the floor should be about $10.

“I think you’ll see, that’s where we’ve got to begin,” he said, with adjustments for inflation year after year.

A bill earlier this year that would have raised the minimum wage to $9 by January 2016, was killed in the state Senate.

MacKenzie said that the wages very from a low in New Hampshire (currently $7.25) to a high ($15 an hour) in places like Seattle, and added that any increase in the minimum wage would go into the pockets of workers and then back into the economy when those workers spent the money.

But when it was pointed out that a minimum wage increase would essentially, especially in the case of government employees where it required tax increases to pay for the increase, transfer of money from some people to other people, MacKenzie challenged the assertion.

“I can tell you that the investment that the minimum wage makes in the community will raise the living standards of all people in that community,” he said.

According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, about three million people in the United States, more than half under the age of 25, earn the minimum wage or less.

About 13,000 people in New Hampshire currently earn the minimum wage. The New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute estimated last year that about 76,000 people could positively be affect by a minimum wage increase.

Many government union contracts across the country have pay scales based on a certain amount above what the federal minimum wage is set to which is why boosting the wage, including for fast food employees, has been a regular political exercise promoted by unions.

A list of the candidates signing the pledge can be found in this link.