Pete Meyers
Tompkins County Worker’s Rights Center
Ithaca, NY.
For me personally, the issue of wages has always been an important one. It really started for me when working as the Produce Manager at the Flatbush Food Coop in Brooklyn, NY in 1991. I thought it unfair that I was making $10 an hour while other workers-working no less hard than I-would be making $5 an hour. For six months, I undertook an experiment where I redistributed my wages to all of the lower paid workers to whereas I would be making no more than the lowest paid worker, but was simultaneously bringing everyone else up. This entire experience showed me, in an up close and personal way, how class politics operate in a small, workplace level and has been part of my philosophy that those of us in the middle class and upper classes need to take *some* responsibility for beginning to redistribute income. More often than not, it's our *own* insecurities that preclude us from taking concrete steps towards a just economic community.
Fast forward to the year 2000. I had just moved to Ithaca, NY and was working as a social worker with people in a welfare to work program. As a result of 1997 Federal legislation, people were now being forced to move off of welfare and into work: most of these people forced to take minimum wage jobs. I thought this to be grossly unfair. Working with a local group founded partially as a result of the anti-WTO protests in Seattle the previous November, the Sharks, or Coalition for Global Justice, would go off to large protests in DC or Philly or NYC. Some of us decided that we needed to have a local manifestation of the anti-corporate globalization movement if we hoped to create a genuine movement that would draw in "regular" people.
“it's our own insecurities that preclude us from taking concrete steps towards a just economic community”
The Living Wage movement seemed to me to be a very logical next step. Many many people nationwide agree that a person shouldn't be working full time and, yet, still be living in poverty. We began to see that the issue of a Living Wage could be seen as an entry point for many people into the larger movement for social and economic justice. Thus in 2001, the Tompkins County Living Wage Coalition was founded. Our campaigns have ranged to an initial incredible success in mobilizing hundreds of local citizens that led to an increase in starting wages for the Paraprofessionals (teacher's aides and assistants in the School System, over 200) who had a starting wage of $6.70 an hour. After this campaign, starting wages were now $9.50! An amazing increase!
In 2003, we founded our Workers' Rights Center, both as a way to provide a more concrete service to people in the here and now (have served over 600 people in our three years) as well as a way to touch and hopefully get involved in our work more people most directly affected by our unjust economic system.
In 2004, workers from Central and South America working at a pizzeria in Collegetown came to us and began to help organizing a campaign to put an end to some very unjust working conditions ($4/hour; unpaid overtime; sleeping in basement of pizzeria). Working together, we were eventually able to obtain $10,000 with and for these workers. This particular situation led us to think that we also needed to create an Immigrant Rights Center, as a specific way to reach out to our immigrant population. We did create this Center last year. There are quite a few other stories of situations we've dealt with in addition to the pizzeria situation.
Last year, we focused a lot of our energy on Wal-Mart, which had just moved into the area. In addition, to over 5200 people signing our petition, we've had a very active campaign demanding that Wal-Mart pay its employees a Living Wage. This has also included actual and ongoing meetings with Wal-Mart management, locally, as well as contact with an employee at another Wal-Mart who provided us with information and an interest in relationship-building with fellow employees at that Wal-Mart. As most of us know, the largest group of low wage workers these days is in the service and retail industries.
Our work continues in Tompkins County, NY. We have had a group working specifically on the vision of involving more low-income people in our work. This group, some in presence today at this Truth Commission, has, as its first manifestation, been doing food pantries at several low-income housing communities in Tompkins County.
Our largest weakness as an organization, to this point, is in finding ways to involve, much more concretely, those people who are most directly affected by our unjust economic system. We need to find better/more effective ways to engage with those at the bottom of the totem pole in leadership and in setting directions for our work. We are thankful to the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign for helping to guide us in this process. Because until we *are* successful in engaging those most affected, we really don't have much hope in transforming this unjust economic capitalist system.