Interns in the News

The Tompkins Weekly, a local paper that covers all of the county, has published two stories recently that featured Workers’ Center interns Kiera Lewis and Robin Comstock.

Kiera is an Ithaca College student from Brattleboro, Vermont, working on forming a student labor group, the Labor Initiative in Promoting Solidarity (LIPS). One of the issues that concerns Kiera and the other students in the new group is Living Wage. Although IC employees who are directly hired do make a living wage, the dining service employees are hired by Sodexo, a French multinational, and not hired at the same rate. The student initiative would require IC to pledge to institute a community responsibility policy, meaning that any company doing business with IC would have to be a living wage employer as well. You can read the article about LIPS and Kiera here.

Kiera and LIPS are also featured in the current issue of The Ithacan, IC’s student newspaper. Right: Kiera at a LIPS meeting. Steven Episcopo/The Ithacan.

The other article, Locals Find Solidarity at Jobs Rally, appeared in last week’s Tompkins Weekly and covered the October 2nd trip to Washington DC to attend the One Nation Working Together Rally. Robin Comstock is a Tompkins Cortland Community College student, majoring in human services. She is also a mother and an intern working with us this semester. Talk about a multi-tasker! Robin is particularly interested in helping other single mothers, working hard to raise their children. An inspiring quotation from Robin in the article is “I used to not speak out because I felt ‘I’m a nobody,’ but what I got from the rally was ‘I’m empowered and I can speak.’ I’m not the only single mom in this world who’s struggling.”

Thanks Robin and Kiera, for your hard work and dedication to social and economic justice.