ITHACA, N.Y. -- More than 35 Buffalo workers got a raise this year and many more will soon get one, thanks to the persistence of a volunteer commission headed by Lou Jean Fleron, a Cornell University faculty member.

The group is Buffalo's Living Wage Commission, the only unpaid citizen's group in the country charged with enforcing a city's living wage law (about 100 cities across the country have a living wage ordinance).

The workers who received the raises are with Buffalo Civic Auto Ramps, the city's largest parking provider. While the company previously offered health insurance to all its employees, some earned as little as $5.25 an hour. Now they now make at least $9.03 an hour, prompting one employee couple to make plans to buy their first home, and another worker to leave behind a second, exhausting job she had held just to make ends meet.

The other four parking garage firms that serve Buffalo also are in the process of adapting to the living wage law. "This is a victory for the whole community, as we are nearing voluntary compliance with all parking contractors," reported Fleron. "Negotations have gone quite smoothly because we use a constructive, non-bureaucratic approach."

The strategy is consistent with Fleron's work as director of economic development initiatives for Cornell's School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR), where she seeks "high-road economic strategies," she said, to get employers, unions, educators and communities to work together to create more good jobs with benefits in the Western New York region.

Buffalo is one of the three poorest cities in the nation, according to the 2000 Census. "City public officials here wanted to support the living wage ordinance but, with tight budgets, did not find the resources to get it done," said Fleron. She related how citizens' groups, led by the Coalition for Economic Justice, sued to get a 1999 living wage law enforced in Buffalo. The case ended in court, where in 2002 a judge held that the city needed to take responsibility for enforcing the law. In 2003, Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello and the city's Common Council unanimously amended the ordinance to create the commission. "We can receive grievances, conduct investigations, hold hearings, issue findings and sanctions, and negotiate," said Fleron.

The ordinance specifies that one Cornell ILR faculty or staff person has a permanent seat on Buffalo's Living Wage Commission. In addition, members include one representative each from the Buffalo Common Council, Coalition of Black Trade Unions, Buffalo Niagara Partnership, Western New York Area Labor Federation, and Western New York Welfare Monitoring Task Force. The Network of Religious Communities gets to select two representatives. The staff includes several lawyers working pro bono, two unpaid interns from the University of Buffalo Law School, and a staff coordinator who is an employee of the Council for Economic Justice, "long the driving force behind the living wage movement in Western New York," said Fleron.

Buffalo's Living Wage Commission has made believers of the firms they've worked with. One human resource director at a Buffalo parking provider reported that paying a living wage has turned out to be better for business, with a more committed work force and less turnover, Fleron said.