A conversation with her dormitory housekeeper sparked Meghana Reddy's passion for the labor movement. The housekeeper told Reddy that her children were vegetarians because the family was too poor to buy meat.
The disparity between stately Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., and the lifestyle of those who maintain it jarred Reddy, a doctor's daughter who is now a leader among an influential group of student activists.
The students in the Stanford Labor Action Coalition are working with a national union to pressure Stanford to improve the lot of janitors, cooks, maintenance workers and other blue-collar employees who work on campus, some for as little as $8.50 an hour, less than $18,000 a year.
The student-union alliance will push for better pay - a "living wage" - and to protect university employees from being replaced by subcontractors. This reflects a national trend occurring at campuses such as the University of California, San Diego, Louisiana State, and Harvard.
Jose Alavez is grateful for the trend. The Stanford Hospital housekeeper, who earns $12.72 an hour, or $26,500 a year, fears that he will be replaced by a lower-paid subcontractor.
Alavez lives alone in Redwood City, Calif., and says his co-workers, family men, are even more anxious. "They are worried because they don't see any future," he said.
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They tried to impress their concerns on hospital administrators, Alavez said, but didn't get far. SLAC, however, was able to secure a meeting with President John Hennessy to relay the workers' concerns and press for policy changes.
"In the end, students have more say than workers do," said Molly Goldberg, a freshman who handles the group's publicity. "Without students, workers aren't getting much of a voice."
Unions know that and have been fostering relationships with students across the nation, offering jobs, internships and hosting summer camps for would-be labor activists.
In each other, they have found ideal partners. Students have latched onto a cause that addresses poverty and immigrants' rights issues. And unions have discovered a group of eager volunteers who can gain publicity and access to the president's office.
"Students bring moral outrage and clarity," said Stephen Lerner, a division director of the national Service Employees International Union, which has 1.5 million members. "And universities have a different relationship with students. Students are who they're catering to."
For the past year, SLAC's 30 members and many supporters have been a constant presence on campus, including rallies at Parents Weekend and Community Day, and a hospital sit-in that led to six arrests.
"I think they have done a very important job in raising the issues," said Chris Christofferson, Stanford's manager of facilities and operations. "Just as I think we have done something very significant responding to it."
Stanford administrators argue they pay competitive wages and that subcontracting is fiscally prudent. There also are concerns that, by ignoring economics and focusing only on social justice, some of the students' proposals are "naive and unreasonable." But no one is denying the group has political pull. One of SLAC's former members, who was arrested in November's hospital protest, was just elected as next year's student body president.
Working with the SEIU, which represents a quarter of Stanford workers, SLAC inspired the university to adopt a "living wage." Stanford now requires its major subcontractors to pay their employees at least $10.10 an hour with medical benefits and $11.35 without benefits. It's the same living wage set by the San Jose City Council.
"This would not have been an issue if SLAC had not raised it as such," said Eduardo Capulong, a Stanford law school lecturer who informally advises the group.
Now, SLAC is pushing Stanford to expand its living wage policy to every employee and raise the rates, perhaps to $11.75 or $14 an hour. No one's arguing that $14 a hour, $29,000 a year, guarantees much of a living on the Peninsula _ where the average home sells for $650,000 and some Stanford professors can't even afford houses _ but it's a substantial increase for some workers.
Nationwide, living wage campaigns have slowly built momentum on college campuses, often evolving from the anti-sweatshop campaigns of the mid-1990s. Unions reminded students that while they fought for overseas textile workers, many on their own campuses earned low salaries.
"The labor movement is trying to refocus itself as the civil rights movement of the century," said Gary Chaison, an industrial relations expert at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Students are "seeing unions not as special-interest groups but as broader voices for working men and women."
The campaigns have met mixed results. The most notable success story is Harvard, where a three-week sit-in and national publicity prompted administrators to agree that janitors' salaries will gradually rise to $14 an hour and that 60 percent of the janitorial staff be hired full-time. Harvard students and union members are now on a national tour to galvanize living wage campaigns at other universities.
Most campaigns have hatched only committees to study the issue, Chaison said. With its living wage policy for subcontractors, Stanford has done far more.
The reaction to Stanford's policy, though, underscores a key obstacle in the campaign. The administration called it historic, and said it could cost Stanford up to $2 million a year. Students complained that Stanford could afford to do more, without cutting programs or raising fees, including the $35,884 tuition and board.
"These costs are real. The laws of economics have not been suspended," Stanford's Christofferson said. "I admire that the students feel passionately about this, but what we've done is an extraordinary thing."
Students argue that the policy affects only 100 non-unionized subcontractors and should apply to all of Stanford's 8,000 employees and an unknown number of subcontractors.
How would Stanford pay for that?
"You've got to figure out where the money comes from. That's your job," Reddy tells the administration. "But we're going to keep putting on the pressure. We're talking about a fundamental issue: survival."
Knight Ridder-Tribune