The Tompkins County Workers' Center announced it now has 80 Certified Living Wage Employers, having just added Bridges Cornell Heights, an ‘assisted living’ facility in Cornell Heights, Ithaca. The significance of Bridges Cornell Heights, an employer of 46 workers, becoming a Living Wage-Certified is that it is exceedingly rare in the ‘assisted living’ industry for workers to start making much more than $8.00/hour.
Says Bridges Cornell Heights owner Elizabeth Ambrose: “Our philosophy at Bridges is that for a job to work for our staff people, it has to really work for them: what they make in terms of ‘pay’, their schedule, their benefits, how they are treated. If it doesn’t work for them, they’re going to become someone else’s employees!”