by Robert Lynch; March 2, 2025
It’s a pay rate many a local employer would be hard-pressed to provide and many a local worker can only envy at a distance.
Reflecting inflation-driven increases in basic necessities, the so-called “Living Wage” for Tompkins County has grown to $24.82 per hour, according to figures released February 26 by the Tompkins County Workers’ Center, an Ithaca-based employee advocacy group.
The revised Living Wage stands 34.5 per cent higher than a comparable calculation the Workers’ Center made two years ago.
“It’s obviously a huge increase,” Workers’ Center Director Pete Myers admitted to a radio interviewer one day after his group had made the new number public. “There are some employers that are going to have a really difficult time with this,” Myers Thursday advised the morning host on WHCU.
To state the just-released Living Wage a little differently, paying $24.82 per hour would earn an employee nearly $200 per day, a thousand dollars a week ($992.80) or $51,625 per year.
The Tompkins Living Wage calculation stands well above—a full 60 per cent above—the legally-enforced $15.50 per hour “Minimum Wage” that New York State currently imposes on employers upstate. The state’s Minimum Wage rose by 50 cents last January. It’ll rise by another 50 cents next year.
“Tompkins County, New York, is the most expensive place to live in Upstate New York, and by some measures one of the most expensive places to live in the United States,” the Workers’ Center asserts on its website.
While the wage increase may seem staggering, it registers not far different from the number local officials had predicted last summer when Myers and his supporters brought their complaint about inadequate local wages to the Tompkins County Legislature. Tompkins County Government already applies Living Wage standards to its county workforce.
In his Thursday broadcast interview, Myers claimed as many as 23,000 employees in Tompkins County earn below the Living Wage. And the worker advocate conceded that for some employers, particularly those in the health care industry, a sector dependent on state subsidies—he singled out Racker (the former Franziska Racker Centers) as an example—the new, higher wage will likely prove impossible to meet.
Myers also acknowledged the special burden placed on “mom and pop” businesses. “This will be really hard to keep up with,” he said of the new benchmark wage and owners’ resulting struggle.
The Workers’ Center website credits researchers at the Ithaca and Buffalo “Co-Labs” for Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations for computing the revised Living Wage. “The latest study was updated to take into account the extreme inflation that took place this past year,” the website states.
“These are basic needs,” Myers said in the WHCU interview regarding the factors driving the revised statistic. Increased rent stands foremost among these, he said. “Rent has increased pretty substantially in the last year,” Myers stated.
The Living Wage calculator, posted by the Workers’ Center, estimates current countywide apartment rental at $1,489 a month, up 17 percent from the $1,276 calculated two years ago.
Still, many may find that even this new, higher rental number seems low, especially for those living in the City of Ithaca, where one must compete for scarce housing with throngs of college students.
Transportation costs have also gone up, Myers said. The new calculations peg local transportation cost at $520 per month, up from $320 two years ago.
Among the other monthly costs estimated: Food at $341; Health Care at $348; and “Taxes” at $909.43.
“It’s definitely a big number,” Pete Myers said of the newly-computed Living Wage. “But for a lot of people it’s not going to be enough to live on.”
And the worker advocate pointed out that the ILR School calculations target costs for only a single person, not a couple or a family. If children were factored in, Myers conceded, the livable pay rate could climb as high as $40 an hour, a plateau impossible for most employers to reach.
Paying a Living Wage is strictly voluntary, not the law, although some local activists have sought to persuade Tompkins County to wrest authority from New York State and enact a stand-alone local Minimum Wage, one that would mirror Myers’ higher number. Doing so would require challenging a long-standing court precedent that assigns the New York State Legislature exclusive power to set minimum compensation.
During his radio interview, Myers claimed 127 local employers voluntarily comply with the Living Wage standard. But he acknowledged that this number may become a high-water mark.
“I presume we’re going to lose a lot of Living Wage employers because of such a large increase,” Myers said.
That may already have occurred. As of February 25, the Workers’ Center’s website listed 66 “Living Wage Employers” as certified. That list includes Tompkins County Government, the Ithaca Teachers Association, and the towns of Ithaca, Caroline, and Danby. Conspicuously absent from the list are the City of Ithaca, the Ithaca City School District, and most noticeably, Cornell University.
The Workers’ Center advises that it will allow employers up to one year to “catch up” to the new, higher Living Wage. To retain certification, employers will need to pay at least $24.82 by the end of December.
Early last July, Democrat Veronica Pillar placed before a Tompkins County legislative committee a resolution that by its title would have moved toward implementing a higher County-wide minimum wage through a local law. Its title overstated expectation. The resolution was mostly process, not substance. And by the time Pillar’s bold move got watered-down and debated to death by the full Legislature one month later, it stopped short of snatching away state authority. Instead, it merely set aside money for a consultant to study the prospect.
Nevertheless, it was during those summertime meetings that Pete Myers first predicted that a $24 an hour Living Wage would be coming soon. Now that it’s here, we can look back and say Myers underestimated reality by nearly a dollar an hour.
But a Living Wage is more than just organized (or disorganized) labor’s lofty aspiration. It can hit taxpayers soon—and hard.
Remember, Tompkins County Government is a Living Wage employer. Its mandates demand payment of living wages. And because they do, our county budgets next year may require padding to cushion the wage burden blow.
“We are a Living Wage employer,” Lansing legislator Mike Sigler reminded colleagues last August when Myers first predicted a $24 Living Wage. “If you just do back-of-the envelope math… you’re looking at over $8 Million it would end up costing the County.”
Sigler that night voted against proceeding with the consultant’s study, as did two other lawmakers. The other eleven members of the Legislature supported moving forth. Nothing’s known to have surfaced publicly from that study to date. And even were the experts to chart a path forward, some recognize that challenging state authority could prove futile.
“A lot of employers are going to feel this is unrealistic,” Pete Myers admitted in his latest radio interview as he addressed the new Living Wage. “So I’m concerned about it,” he said.
Pete’s not the only one. It costs a lot to live in Tompkins County; or to pay people sufficiently to remain living here. Perhaps it’s the price Ithaca pays for its prosperity. If more small businesses shutter, or your taxes go up, this new Living Wage may stand at fault for the new reality we’re all about to face. Better brace for it.
###