Giving Tuesday: Building a More Just Community
The Tompkins County Workers’ Center (TCWC) is on a move to change the way workers are treated in the workplace, advocate for increased wages, and support workers’ organizing efforts to improve workplace conditions.
We’re constantly being challenged financially as a small nonprofit in a rural area. Our base of neighbors like YOU constantly remind us how awesome you are, keeping us going and showing unscrupulous employers that they CAN’T get away with whatever they want. Please stand with us as we lead in to #GivingTuesday!
You can double the impact of your gift as Jobs with Justice, our national network partner, will match every donation we receive up to $10,000 before December 31st. Your monthly or one-time gifts will help us reach this goal.
If you would consider sharing on YOUR Facebook page, we’d be eternally grateful!
Read on to learn more about our work in the past year:
- Worker Organizing: Through years of creating the platform from which workers can organize a union in their workplaces, this past year the TCWC assisted workers at Sciencecenter, GreenStar, Ithaca Coffee Company, Coltivare restaurant, and 3 at other businesses in their union organizing efforts;
- Worker Organizing: We organized, along with the national organization, Labor Notes, the first Fingerlakes Troublemakers School here in Tompkins County, bringing together more than 200 workers from across upstate New York and northern Pennsylvania;
- Workers’ Rights Hotline: Our Workers’ Rights Hotline dealt with over 400 new cases from November 2018 through October 2019 of this year. This includes close to 100 cases of wage theft. Our work in this area over the years has resulted in judgments winning $1.4 million for workers;
- Living Wage: In May 2019, the TCWC joined with Alternatives Federal Credit Union in raising the 2019 Tompkins County Living Wage to $15.37 per hour, and continue to push to get the county to adopt this as the minimum wage for all workers here;
- Living Wage: We certified nine new Living Wage Employers this past year, including over 30 workers at Downtown Ithaca Children’s Center, a childcare center that receives a large amount of government-funded subsidies;
- Immigrant Rights: We partner with the Tompkins County Immigrant Rights Coalition, joining with them in supporting workers targeted by immigration actions and in providing TCIRC’s fiscal sponsorship;
- Restaurant Owners’ Manual: Two months ago, we released our 2nd edition of the Upstate New York Restaurant Owners’ Manual, a comprehensive resource on employer obligations and employee rights in the food service industry that is distributed to EVERY restaurant in Tompkins County by the County Department of Health.
