Ithaca moves to revive just-cause labor talks with new committee and public focus

Ithaca city leaders are reviving efforts to explore “just-cause” labor protections, as Mayor Robert G. Cantelmo moves to reconstitute a stalled working group and shift the discussion toward broader public engagement on whether and how the city should limit at-will employee terminations.

The push to explore just-cause labor protections in Ithaca began in February 2024, when the Common Council and city manager identified stronger worker protections as a high-priority issue during a legislative retreat. In March 2024, Cantelmo appointed a legislative working group, initially chaired by Alderperson Ducson Nguyen, to study the issue and recommend next steps.

The group met over the following eight months and produced a memo, dated Aug. 28, which the Common Council formally accepted at a Sept. 17 special meeting. At that meeting, council members announced that Alderperson Kayla Matos would take over as chair of the working group, replacing Nguyen, as the city shifts into a phase focused on broader public engagement and continued deliberation, rather than immediate legislative action.

Since the working group formed in 2024, it met “a handful of times” before it stopped working on the issue, Cantelmo said.

The council requested a reauthorization of the group to continue the work, which the mayor granted in the fall of last year, but no meetings took place between the reauthorization and the end of 2025.

“If you look back at the resolution from the fall when I reauthorized the working group, I instructed the working group to collect a number of organizations that would provide testimony, schedule a public hearing, and none of that was done, frankly,” said the mayor.

“I think we will sort of shuffle the membership around, and hopefully we will see these conversations pick back up,” Cantelmo added. “Recognizing that this is a really important issue, I will be reconstituting the working group again with a slightly different mandate.”

At the February meeting of Common Council, Cantelmo plans to bring forward a resolution that would establish a special committee, rather than a working group, and his mandate would require the council to be open to meetings with the public and hearing public comment, with the goal of holding the council accountable for doing the proper research and engaging in conversations with the community as the issue moves forward.  

Cantelmo said that he cannot provide any specific dates but he could detail the process the committee would go through on the road to approval: the council will collect research and testimony and reach a consensus within the committee about the type of solution the members want implemented. That would be followed by legislative drafting in the city attorney’s office before a consideration of any prospective policy by the council. There would be further public meetings held before the legislation’s final adoption.

“I think as a community we really value robust labor protections,” Cantelmo said. “We obviously recognize that we’re living in an affordability crisis; that intersects with housing, with our jobs and job security, and we want to ensure that we are striking the right balance of robust labor protections in an environment that incentivizes the continued health, growth and expansion of our economic engines here in the city.”

“I think, at the end of the day, we live in a society … that is largely driven by at-will employment decisions,” Cantelmo added.

He said that the United States is exceptional among post-industrialized countries for the relative lack of contractual, or more rigid, regulatory labor standards.

“We hear a lot from businesses that they don’t want to terminate employees,” Cantelmo said. “It’s hard for them; you know, it’s costly for them. And I sort of believe that that’s probably true on paper. But at the same time, if that is the case, and there are corrective problems, what we need to do is ensure that there’s some intelligible standard in what discipline looks like, for the employer-employee relationship. We want to ensure that we are allowing for a healthy dialogue between both parties while also not allowing for these gaps in the law that allow for capricious terminations.”

In a memo from last year that laid out a rough plan for potential legislation, calls made to the Tompkins County Workers’ Center were cited as a strong reason to look into the issue.

“There is a hotline [to the Workers’ Center], and historically the number-one reason people call is because they’re unfairly terminated, or they feel like they’re about to be,” said Pete Meyers, coordinator for the Workers’ Center, which has a workers rights hotline and describes its role in the community as advocating for, providing resources for and supporting workers in the community with any issue they have related to employment.

Concerns around termination or an impending firing accounted for 26% of the calls that the Workers’ Center received since it opened in May of 2003. “So, that’s over 1,700 people that have contacted us about just-cause,” Meyers said.

He pointed out what Cantelmo mentioned as context for the local issue: “Something I like to think about is that just about every industrialized country in the world has just-cause termination. So, the United States is a real outlier on this issue.”

The protection a union offers employees typically includes just-cause termination rights, but, Meyers said, there are obstacles to unionizing.

“With all due respect, my brother works at GreenStar, and he was instrumental in starting the union, but GreenStar is an unusual place,” Meyers said. “There are a lot of workplaces where people would be scared to death to even try it. So, I think that really stands in the way for a lot of people.”

One aspect of just-cause that could be included in the legislation, and one that was mentioned in the Common Council’s memo on the subject, is giving the employee a chance to fix any performance issues based on the employer’s feedback and giving adequate warning before a firing goes into effect.

“One of the words for this is progressive discipline — the idea of giving someone warning that something needs to change,” Meyers said. “The worker isn’t just a cog in a machine; it’s a human being. They should have some rights in the process, and if they were in a union, they would.”

There are state protections against discriminatory firings, but Meyers said local legislation would mean additional security for workers.

“There’s no [local] board that deals specifically with termination,” he said, “and in an overwhelmingly white area, discrimination isn’t going to be most people’s issue. Local just-cause legislation would include other unjust reasons for firing. The flip side is: what are the just reasons? A local board would review cases and determine that.”

“A lot of people who feel unjustly terminated want an attorney, but they can’t afford one,” he added. “This would give them a way to raise concerns at minimal cost, if any.”

Ian Greer, Cornell University research professor and director of Cornell’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations Co-Lab, said there are very few instances of just-cause worker protections in the United States. Really, he said, there are only three: New York City has a law that protects exclusively fast-food workers, and Philadelphia has a law that pertains to parking employees.

And in Montana, the only state with a broad just-cause employment system, 29% of businesses have fewer than 20 employees, while 17% of New York’s businesses employ fewer than 20 people, according to the 2022 United States economic census.

Greer pointed to the Netherlands as a country whose data would refute the notion that protecting workers means higher rates of unemployment, as the Netherlands is the 10th most protective country in the world and has an unemployment rate of 3.5 %, which was almost identical to the United States’ unemployment rate of 3.6 % in 2022.  

“The idea [among research academics] was that if you have strict employment protection rules, you’ll have high unemployment and workers will have difficulty getting jobs,” he explained, “and it just isn’t borne out by the data.”

The Common Council has talked about making small businesses exempt from any potential just-cause law. In the city of Ithaca, about 12% of businesses would be excluded if the law pertained only to businesses with more than 10 employees. Roughly 21% of businesses would be exempt if the law affected only those employers with a staff of more than 20, according to data Greer obtained from the economic census.

Andrew Gardiner, a landlord who has nine ground-floor commercial and retail tenants in the city of Ithaca, said that the owners of the small businesses he rents to were largely unaware of the just-cause discussion until relatively recently.

“The fact that the council formed a working group was positive for them,” he said. “Many of them are so consumed with the act of running a small business that they don’t pay attention to this stuff.”

He said that he has heard from his tenants that they are feeling the uncertainty of the possibly impending new laws without knowing many of the details, including the logistics and the costs that might be associated for small businesses.

“I don’t know how this is going to impact seasonal businesses,” he added. “There’s just a lot of super-important questions, and I hope that when Common Council puts together their policy, they give the full use case of ‘Bob’s having issues; we’re considering firing him. … What do we have to do?’”