On January 4 in New Hampshire, the day before a new, anti-union governor was sworn in, labor activists held a rally at the state capitol. The Republican governor-elect wants to make it harder for unions to exist. “The next few years are bound to be incredibly difficult, especially if these changes happen along with changes to voting rights,” Kim Schmidl-Gagne told the Valley Post on January 2. She works at Keene State College and was a leader of the successful union organizing drive among 300 or so workers there in April 2016. The college fought the workers' effort to form a union.

On January 2, Schmidl-Gagne told the Valley Post, “New Hampshire has been swinging from left to right and then back again with each election. We are ready to do all that we can to at least stall changes (the governor-elect wants) and see if a new election cycle will change things again.”

The rally organizers have a web site at www.radNH.org.

Changes to voting rights in New Hampshire are being proposed by leaders of the Republican-controlled state legislature to make it impossible for college students in New Hampshire to vote in the state if they grew up in another state.

States that have passed the anti-union laws that New Hampshire's governor-elect is proposing include Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. According to the AFL-CIO, workers in the states that have passed these so-called “right to work” laws earn an average of $6,109 less per year and are 49 percent more likely to die on the job.