"The Living Wage campaign at the University of Virginia is a solidarity movement--students, workers, faculty and community members joined together around an issue that affects every person in the entire region of Charlottesville.

When university employees are underpaid, these employees often require some form of social service to be provided by the city through tax revenue. This cost, fundamentally the responsibility of the university, is passed on to the city and its taxpayers.

Faculty and students are affected when their university, founded on the high ideal of freedom of expression so often extolled by Thomas Jefferson, are ignored and dismissed by-administrators who fail to recognize that students not only have the right to dissent but also the obligation, as university students, to offer creative and intelligent approaches to better our community.

And of course, workers are affected when the university pays poverty wages, because workers are forced to make a choice: What will be left out of their budget for the month? Food? School supplies? Rent?

These examples seem exaggerated, but the members of the Living Wage Campaign have heard first-hand the stories of workers at the university who simply do not make enough money to survive on. Hearing these stories, the campaign attempted to take action on this issue, meeting with administrators in an attempt to correct this tragic breach of social contract.

No one within the administration, however, was willing to take responsibility for helping to end the tradition of poverty wages at the university, so the responsibility to do so fell to the students in the campaign.

After exhausting all other avenues of discourse, 17 of those students participated in a sit-in inside Madison Hall, home to the office of University President John Casteen III, in an effort to ensure that the matter of a living wage at UVa was properly and promptly addressed.

It is essential to recognize that the Living Wage Campaign has not ended. Common misconceptions place the date the demise of the campaign sometime between the April 15 arrest of those students or potentially with the end of the semester upon us and the subsequent graduation of many students who have helped to organize the campaign thus far.

But this is a testament to privilege, this ability to measure time in semesters. A student's timeline - four years, eight terms, and then one moves on into the "real world," time spent at UVa a mere backdrop for the impending beginning of one's life - is inherently flawed.

Time is not measured in semesters; it is measured in months, and weeks, and hours, and long after the semester's end, after graduation parties and job acceptances, the underpaid workers will continue to mark time by counting underpaid hour after underpaid hour.

The campaign's goal is neither notoriety nor self-affirmation for students: It is a living wage. Until the goal is reached, the campaign will not end.

The campaign is not about demonizing or embarrassing people, although the university administration has certainly embarrassed itself with its use of police force to arrest peaceful student protesters.

While it is essential to ensure that individuals in positions of power are responsible to the cries of the community, it is not a goal of the campaign to paint a picture of President Casteen as a wicked and evil man, nor is it to portray the students who participated in the sit-in as unblemished martyrs.

The campaign is about all parties affirming a truth that seems self-evident: Anyone working full-time has the right - the fundamental, human right - to earn enough money from that job on which to live.

The issues affecting those who work for less than a living wage at the University of Virginia are myriad, and they will not all be settled by increasing the amount of pay for all employees to $10.72 per hour.

At the end of the day, however, the universal affirmation that worker rights are human rights issues a moral imperative to those of us who belong, in some capacity, to the University of Virginia.

Students, faculty, workers and community members all have a distinct stake in the university's actions, and when the university's actions in regard to the payment of low wages lack a sense of morality as well as a willingness to change, all those involved must be concerned with the lack of vision provided by UVa administrators.

Offering, as those administrators have, to introduce members of the campaign to legislators in the General Assembly is not enough. Such an offer fails to acknowledge the power of the university to set wages for their own employees and fails to assert a commitment to a living wage.

Recently denying a proposal to appoint a committee for the study and implementation of a new wage policy only reaffirms the university's commitment to the payment of poverty wages.

The living wage is not, as the critique often goes, mere radical foolishness borne of highminded liberal ideals without any connection to reality. Reality, in fact, is the hallmark of the living wage, and the reality of working for less than $10.72 per hour in Charlottesville is that one does not earn enough money on which to survive.

Across the nation, universities and cities - Charlottesville included - have affirmed that paying workers a living wage is not only an important and intelligent way to approach the issue of poverty, but that it is the right 'thing to do.

The administration's objections that the matter is not as easy as we'd like to believe are false. We know that change is difficult, and we know that the university has competing priorities.

'But if UVa wishes to consider itself a leader in any field, it must first be willing to prioritize economic justice and human rights for all its workers." (Kevin Simowitz, The Daily Progress, May 14, 2006)