Tompkins County Workers' Center Website
Mission
Support. We will provide information, referrals to appropriate government or private agencies, and emotional support.
Advocacy. We will advocate with employers, agencies and government officials for and alongside workers who are being treated unfairly, in order to correct problems, end worker rights violations and improve conditions.
Empowerment. We will seek to create and nourish community-based economic justice organizations that include a majority of low-income people in leadership and activist roles.
Social Change. We will also seek to inform, educate and shape community values and standards of employer behavior with respect to workplace rights and the treatment of low-income people. We support the use of diverse strategies to achieve social change, such as popular education, public testimony (telling what is really happening in our workplaces and in the lives of low-income people), public protests, direct action and legislative campaigns.
Description of Work
The Tompkins County Workers' Center is composed of a group of low and middle income residents of Tompkins County, as well as over 50 affiliated organizations. Our Mission is to stand up with all workers treated unfairly at work or faced with critical poverty, racial, housing, health care or other social and economic issues. We will support, advocate for, and seek to empower these workers, and we will work together with them to create a more just community and world.
Director's Bio
Pete Meyers, personally, the issues of workers' rights and economic justice are incredibly important to develop a critical mass of people who are working for justice and peace in a sustained way. The development of Workers' Centers around the country is phenomenal, and illustrates the reconceptualization of economic justice work as not just "issue-oriented", but community oriented.
Pete has worked at various jobs that have led to us leadership of the Workers' Center. As a drug counselor in an inner-city Brooklyn High School for four years; As a social worker with homeless populations; welfare-to-work populations where people were being forced off of welfare into minimum wage jobs; history of political organizing, i.e. traveling to Caribbean and Central America; electoral politics; Living Wage advocacy; anti-nuclear work; war tax resistance.
Social Impact
Our Workers' Rights Hotline helps approximately 200 people a year, providing free and confidential information, referral and advocacy assistance to workers who feel they have been treated unfairly. We have won over $115,000 in back wages for dozens of workers. Some high profile cases include successfully advocating with workers at Collegetown Pizzeria; Diamond's Restaurant; and Kinko's.
It is safe to say that the concept of Living Wages is something that most people know about in Tompkins County. It has become fairly institutionalized. We presently recognize 64 employers as being Living Wage Employers. Our Living Wage work, as mentioned above, has seriously helped to "raise the bar" about what people should expect in terms of renumeration for their work. Situated within a larger movement towards Living Wage, the Workers' Center (formally known as the Tompkins County Living Wage Coalition) is relatively unique in its long term work on Living Wage, as contrasted to many local organizations working, for the most part, on Living Wage Ordinances, and then disbanding.