Please, put out a red alert. Andrew Cuomo has been kidnapped. The man who occupies the governor’s office is a body double.

Seriously, where has the guy gone who was a shill for big business, a guy who took pleasure attacking unions and seemed to like only tax breaks for the wealthy? The guy who five years ago I anointed as the “poodle for the rich”? The guy who pocketed more money from the Koch Brothers than Scott Walker?

First, hell froze over when he said he’d raise the minimum wage for 10,000 state workers to $15-an-hour.

Now, it’s clear there is a fake in Albany, and the real governor has been spirited away:

Continuing a push for the payment of higher wages for public-sector jobs, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York will announce a plan on Monday to raise the minimum wage for state university workers to $15.

The executive action, to be announced at a rally in Manhattan, comes after Mr. Cuomo used a state wage board to increase hourly pay to $15 for fast-food workers last summer and unveiled a similar plan  for an estimated 10,000 state workers in November. The university plan will affect a larger number of state employees – about 28,000, according to estimates from the governor’s office — and is designed to include students who use work-study jobs to pay tuition and bills while attending classes.

Many of those jobs currently pay the minimum wage, which last week rose to $9 in New York State. Under Mr. Cuomo’s plan, wages for such jobs would rise, again, to $9.75 next month at nearly three-dozen campuses across the state. Salaries at the City University of New York campuses would not be increased, though employees at some State University of New York schools in the city, such as Maritime College in the Bronx and Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, would see their hourly pay rise to $10.50 in February.

To be sure, this is all part of his makeover…you might even argue that this is the calculating politician who sees another status quo candidate, the one he has endorsed for president, grabbing on to poll-tested positions that show people very much care about class warfare, inequality and object to a poverty-level minimum wage—positions neither he nor his status quo candidate every did much about nor cared about but are desperate to keep political power.

Whatever. It’s a good thing for those workers who will benefit.