As the cost of living surges in Ithaca, the Tompkins County Workers’ Center aims to protect labor rights through advocacy, mentorship and education. Since its founding, the Workers’ Center has gained an annual client base of over 450 workers and secured judgments exceeding $1.3 million in wage theft cases.
Directing the Workers’ Center is Pete Meyers, who has played an instrumental role in the organization’s success since co-founding it in 2003. According to Meyers, the Workers’ Center has also helped start 11 successful union drives.
Even before his involvement in the Workers’ Center, Meyers was an advocate for employees of the Flatbush Food Co-op, a grocery store in Brooklyn, where he worked as a produce manager.
“It seemed unfair that I was making twice as much as the people that I was supervising,” Meyers said. In response, he decided to redistribute his wages to the lowest-paid workers at the co-op. After a year and a half, although the workers’ wages had not been changed, the experience had committed him to the idea of living wages, Meyers said.
Meyers moved to Ithaca from South Bend, Indiana in January 2000. He was a mentor in a Welfare-to-Work program through Catholic Charities in Tompkins County, primarily working with single mothers in need of employment.
Knowing these workers would likely obtain minimum wage jobs — which at that time paid $5 an hour — Meyers decided to take action.
Alongside labor activist Carl Feuer, Meyers founded the Tompkins County Living Wage Coalition, an initiative to establish living wages for workers in the county. Six months later, the project grew to include a workers’ rights hotline — one of the few in the country at the time, Meyers said.
“The government doesn’t really support people that well,” Meyers said. “When you contact them, they’ll tell [you] how to fill out forms. [The Workers’ Rights Hotline] is there in an emotionally supportive way, and we’re still doing that many years later.”
Since its foundation, the hotline — now called the Tompkins County Workers’ Center — has had over 5,600 cases, with about 1,500 claims of wrongful termination.
As director of the Workers’ Center, Meyers heads the Living Wage Campaign, which aims to increase the minimum wage for workers in Tompkins County.
In Tompkins County, the living wage — a measure of the cost of basic living expenses, such as food, rent, transportation, healthcare and communication — was most recently estimated to be $24.64 per hour by the MIT Living Wage Calculator. The current minimum wage in Tompkins County remains at $15 per hour.
Tension over low wages came to a head during the United Auto Workers Local 2300 strikes earlier this year, during which the Workers’ Center provided support for Cornell employees, Meyers said.
In 2023, the living wage for county residents saw its highest annual increase in 30 years, rising by 9.6 percent, a measurement estimated by Industrial and Labor Relations Senior Researcher and Ithaca Co-Lab Director Ian Greer M.S. ’03 Ph.D. ’05.
Tompkins County has the highest income inequality in Upstate New York and New York State has the highest in the country, Greer explained in an interview with The Sun. According to Greer, the county has faced weak wage growth in recent years, and the Workers’ Center plays an important role in finding solutions to these issues.
“Pete knows all the legislators. He can call them up anytime,” Greer said. “He really has his ear to the ground in the workplace, so he knows what’s going on in workplaces.”
In 2006, the center started the nation’s first Living Wage Employer Certification Program, an initiative to accredit employers who pay their workers a living wage, according to Meyers. The program has since been expanded to states including North Carolina and Virginia. The organization also offers internships in social justice for local high school and college students.
Despite the program’s many successes, unstable funding presents an ongoing barrier to the Workers’ Center’s efforts. The center relies on about $200,000 annually, including individual contributions and grants.
“They’re very effective at getting donations from individuals, but they also need grants,” Greer said. “If they lose their funding, then they have to lay people off.”
Following the 2024 election, labor rights activists’ worries about low funding have deepened. Meyers expressed concerns about potential cuts to agencies under Trump’s second administration.
“The big elephant in the room is with Trump being elected,” Meyers said. ”Does that mean the National Labor Relations Board, which is a federal agency that we work with, is going to be emasculated?”
Stephanie Heslop, a member of the Tompkins County Workers’ Center Board, said she is also concerned about the potential impact of the incoming Trump administration on unions and labor rights.
“The living wage is not extravagant — it is just the bare minimum that people need to make, and that there are people who are against it is shocking to me,” Heslop said. “It’s frustrating that it has taken all these years and we still don’t have [a minimum wage equal to a living wage] locally.”
Still, the fight for a living wage is far from over. The center continues to uphold its mission to “empower working people, to provide [them] with resources and knowledge about their rights, to connect [them] with resources to form unions, and to support [those] who don’t have unions,” Heslop said.
Emma Cohen ’28 is a Sun contributor and can be reached at [email protected].