June, 2005

Minister’s Column
Rev. Susan Phillips
Keene (NH) Unitarian Universalist Church

A one-bedroom apartment in Keene rents for about $400 a month. Modest food for a single person costs about $100 a month. Enough gas to get to and from work in a week costs roughly $25. Add all that up, and the merest necessities of life in our community require more than $11,000 a year. That’s before health insurance, day care, clothing, telephone bills, and car payments, not to mention recreation of any kind. But a full-time worker earning our state’s minimum wage, currently at $5.15 per hour, makes only $10,712 each year. After years of inaction, the New Hampshire State Legislature is considering a bill (HB665) that would increase the minimum wage over three years to $6.65 (which is still less than the current minimum wage in many states, including Vermont where it is $7.00 per hour). In the coming weeks I will have the honor of testifying before the NH State Senate Banking Committee in support of this modest and overdue increase. I share below an excerpt from my testimony.

“I am the Reverend Sue Phillips. I am the minister of the Keene Unitarian Universalist Church, and I come before you to testify in favor of the bill you are considering to raise the minimum wage in our state. Almost every day in my work, I visit with people from Keene and the surrounding area who need help. They wait on the hard bench outside my little office, sometimes with babies in their arms, sometimes with their husband or wife. They come in dirty work uniforms and clean, well used clothes. But always they come because they are having a hard time making ends meet. As I sit with them, I ask about their lives, and what has brought them to this place, and how the people of my congregation can help. Almost to a person, what they need most is food. Food, they say. No matter how often I hear this, I am surprised.

I am surprised because so many of the people I talk with have jobs. They are day care workers and gas station attendants. They work at fast food restaurants and do seasonal work plowing snow and mowing lawns. Almost to a person, those who come asking me for help work in jobs that harden their hands and often wear on their spirits. And almost all of them are paid the lowest possible wage allowed by law. These good people are doing everything they know how to do to provide for themselves and their families. It is not right that their daily labors do not pay enough for them to make ends meet. It is simply not right that they should have to come begging simply so that they can feed themselves and their children.

My religion teaches me that each person has inherent worth and dignity. And while I see that inherent worth shining in the spirit of each person who comes to my church needing help, I can also glimpse sometimes that their own sense of dignity has been worn down by the constant struggle to survive. When we sanction a minimum wage that does not permit working people to take care of themselves, even at the lowest standards of living, we violate their inherent worth and dignity. When we sanction a minimum wage that requires hardworking people to choose between a roof over their heads and food on their tables, we violate their inherent worth and dignity.

I believe that you and I share a common calling to care for people in our communities. Not because we are legislators, or ministers, but because we are human beings. Whatever your faith, whatever your most deeply held beliefs, I ask you to consider, in some quiet moment of your day, how you are called to protect the worth and dignity of the lowest paid people among us.”