This is YOUR Workers’ Center: We Need Your Support!

Thank you so much for helping to sustain our Tompkins County Workers’ Center (TCWC) over the years. You play a significant role in our work, and we are writing to ask for your renewed support! For the past 19 years, the Tompkins County Workers’ Center (TCWC) has been 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.

The pandemic has been forcing many people for the first time to face the inequities of privilege and wealth and recognize the cycle of poverty and injustice that is at the heart of our capitalist economy and larger society. We must all decide: Do we return to the way things were or do we use this moment to demand a radical transformation of the American workplace?

Responding to this crisis, in recent months we have:

https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/tompkins-county-workers-center-fundraising-page
  • been successfully funded by the NYS Department of Labor to get out the word and support primarily immigrants without documentation to get access to the Excluded Workers Fund (up to $15,000 per person) that was set up by the State of New York in July 2021;
  • assisted a constant stream of desperate worker who are contacting our Hotline about being unfairly terminated from their jobs, or who felt bullied by management, or who want to organize a union such as a group of workers we’re presently working with at a well-known local nonprofit, as well as dealing with a large number of inquiries from ‘essential workers’ about their feeling unsafe in their workplaces;
  • supported workers at Cayuga Nursing & Rehabilitation Center in their demand for a fair contract with management and to be paid a Living Wage;
  • certified new Living Wage Employers that tend to be in traditionally low-wage industries, including Lakeview Mental Health Services, Ithaca Marriott Hotel, and GreenStar Food Coop, representing over 400 workers now guaranteed a Living Wage;
  • being the first organization in the nation to certify employers as being Living Wage, we played a major role in November in the introduction of a new organization, Living Wage for US, spun off from Oxfam America, to certify businesses as being Living Wage Employers on a NATIONAL level.

YOU make our work possible. For 19 years, the generosity of our member allies, like yourself, has helped us guide and support the workers who make our community a good place to call home. If you are in a position to help, please support our work with a generous gift and keep our community at the forefront of labor organizing and workers’ rights. Your monthly/recurring gifts are also VERY MUCH welcomed!