Despite Arrests, U-Va. Students Devoted to Bettering Workers

Previous protests at other schools, including Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford and Harvard universities, have also brought results.

Some critics say the students are being manipulated by groups with other agendas.

"The unions are heavily behind it," said John Doyle of the Employment Policies Institute, a think tank that focuses on entry-level employment issues. "It's fertile ground for them, with a lot of young people who are . . . thinking more often with their hearts than with their minds," he said, adding that pay raises can cost jobs.

Stephen Lerner, who directs the Service Employees International Union's Justice for Janitors campaign, said students are often the ones calling the union, not the other way around.

"You have a moral responsibility, a community responsibility, to make sure the people that pick up after you are paid decently," said Lerner, whose organization started in the 1980s when building owners, universities and others began outsourcing jobs.

When the union noticed contractors paying low wages without benefits, he said, it launched a national campaign to pressure institutions to take responsibility for workers' conditions.

The campaign for a living wage at U-Va. started in 1998. It scored a memorable victory when the hourly wage for non-faculty employees was raised from $6.50 to about $8 in 2000. The cost of living has soared since then, and today's lowest hourly wage of $9.37 -- raised from $8.88 last month -- has not kept pace, advocates say. University officials say generous benefits add 35 percent to workers' compensation.

But students argue that many workers are paid far less. That's because some are not direct employees of the university. Instead, contractors employ them as food servers, janitors and groundskeepers.

Casteen has said that under an advisory opinion from Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R), he does not have the legal authority to raise wages for employees of contractors.

Nor can the administration unilaterally give raises to the more than 10,000 non-faculty employees, said Carol Wood, a university spokeswoman. The school has gradually been increasing pay scales, but it would need the General Assembly's approval to grant a raise as high as the $10.72 living wage that activists are demanding, she said.

No one disputes that university employees are among the working poor.

Joy Johnson, a community activist who lives in Charlottesville's largest public-housing development, estimated that 95 percent of those in the 136 units work for the University of Virginia. She said they consider it too risky to join the protests.