Working families in New Hampshire are no strangers to kitchen-table conversations about how to stretch a budget to fix a plumbing leak or pay for a new alternator belt. It’s not easy but most families work hard to figure out how to make ends meet.
Unless, of course, the unexpected happens, requiring far more resources than car maintenance or home repairs. What happens when cancer strikes or a parent with dementia needs support transitioning to assisted living? What about when an adult child develops an opioid addiction and grandparents suddenly find themselves caring full time for grandchildren?
At some point, nearly everyone needs to take time away from work to deal with a serious personal or family illness. Health emergencies don’t discriminate but our workforce policies do.
A big majority of Granite Staters do not have access to paid family and medical leave and those who do tend to be high earners. Middle- and low-income folks – the people who are likely to feel a missed paycheck the most – are the least likely to have access to paid family and medical leave benefits.
It’s about time that the economic struggle of working families takes center stage in the gubernatorial debate and beyond. Issues like paid family and medical leave insurance are being discussed by candidates up and down the ballot, and it is easy to see why. Family and medical leave insurance has the support of 82 percent of New Hampshire voters. This support is broad, deep and bipartisan.
In addition to being popular among voters, development of a family and medical leave program would help New Hampshire address some of our most significant challenges – attracting a younger workforce, recovering from the opioid epidemic, meeting the needs of our aging population, and helping kids get the right start.
Creation of a family and medical leave insurance program is not a partisan issue. In his 2016 campaign for governor, Chris Sununu unambiguously endorsed establishing a state paid leave program. Earlier this year, a bipartisan bill advanced through three votes in the Republican-controlled New Hampshire House, and stalled when the governor, in an about-face, threatened to veto the legislation.
Molly Kelly has made paid leave a centerpiece of her campaign and in doing so has put Gov. Sununu on the hot seat for his shifting stance on the issue.
Sununu deserves to be pinned down on this issue. In a span of less than two years, he supported paid leave in his campaign before he opposed bipartisan legislation. He then supported a last-minute (broadly dismissed as unworkable) version that the House soundly rejected, and finally threatened to veto the bipartisan House bill when it made it to the Senate. He referred to paid leave as “vacation” before announcing that he was working on a secret plan he hasn’t discussed with any stakeholders who have been working for years to make the case for paid leave and craft policy that will meet those needs.
Among these stakeholders are the state employees whose participation he cites as critical to his idea. State employee benefits are determined through collective bargaining not executive order. If the governor successfully bargains with state employees to establish a family and medical leave benefit, he suggests that alone will create enough incentive to create a private market that doesn’t currently exist. No private carriers offer paid family and medical leave benefits to individuals in New Hampshire and we lack a regulatory structure for this type of product. Would products be guaranteed issue or would people with pre-existing conditions be discriminated against or priced out of the market? Would benefits be community rated? Would rates be regulated? When would products be available for purchase? These are just a few of the important unanswered questions.
A plan that is unaffordable will lead to a continuation of the status quo in which 80 percent of the nearly 300,000 New Hampshire workers who have an annual family income of under $60,000 lack access to paid family and medical leave. It will also fail to ensure the families that have greater caregiving needs gain access to this important benefit.
The governor hasn’t set a goal or made a commitment to ensure all working people in New Hampshire are guaranteed affordable access to a paid family and medical leave insurance program with meaningful benefits. He is silent on whether employees who use or expect to use benefits would be protected from retaliation. He doesn’t make any commitments to ensuring low-income working people or those who work part time or seasonally would have access to coverage they can afford or depend on, or coverage at all. He doesn’t make any commitments at all beyond committing to talk to state employees about whether they want to be the risk pool for the rest of the state.
His only plan is to hope that a private market that hasn’t existed before suddenly will develop. This isn’t a plan crafted by a leader; it is an idea promulgated 18 days before an election to provide some cover for our governor’s failure to lead on an issue that matters to New Hampshire voters.
The governor says he has a “plan” but offers no parameters, no details, no timeline or budget. That’s no plan. It’s a fig leaf.
(Amanda Sears is the director of the Campaign for a Family Friendly Economy.)