Housekeepers facing wage and benefit cuts under a Wittenberg University plan to switch to a non-union contractor have offered to form a non-profit corporation in hopes of reducing costs to the university while preserving better wages and benefits for themselves.

The offer was announced to a crowd of about 200 outside the university’s Benham Pence Student Center on Monday during a rally in which a series of speakers challenged the university to continue to pay a “living wage” to its employees while tackling its $7 million deficit.

Wittenberg last week announced it would replace housekeeping provider ABM with WFF Facilities Services Jan. 1 at an annual financial savings of $600,000 or 40 percent, to narrow that gap.

Before awarding the contract, the university took the unusual step of allowing ABM to submit a second bid, which still came in about $300,000 higher than WFF’s successful proposal.

ABM now employs 37 housekeepers, a number WFF would reduce by a handful. WFF will begin to accept applications today from the current staff, though will offer hourly wages of $8.50, a reduction to senior employees who make more than $14 an hour. In addition, housekeepers would have to pay the full amount of monthly health care premiums and lose other benefits.

Miriam Mayse, who has worked at the university for 19 years, said that operating housekeeping as a non-profit could allow the staff to reduce university costs by using students to help with the work and reduce costs by eliminating the need to turn a profit.

She said details could be worked out over the coming year and asked the university to “take my dream and make it a reality.”

The university had no immediate response to the proposal.

In an email to the university last week, President Laurie M. Joyner said that balancing its budget is “absolutely critical” to Wittenberg as it tries to recruit from “a shrinking pool of increasingly price-sensitive high school graduates” in a weak economy with a limited endowment.

Although not commenting on the plan, Springfield Mayor Warren Copeland, who teaches social ethics at Wittenberg, said he was proud to have been part of a political campaign that said “the people with the least resources shouldn’t be asked to solve the (nation’s financial) problem.”

He said he believes Wittenberg should follow the same principle.

“I believe in a living wage, and it seems to me that’s what’s at stake in this situation.”

Copeland also urged those at the rally not to turn the matter into “an individual issue.”

Administrators involved in the decision are “people I know, respect and count as friend,” Copeland said. “This is a community issue, and I think this is a simple statement … that we want to include all our people (in the changes) on a fair basis.”

Sociology professor Dave Nibert said that the housekeeping staff that already has been outsourced and downsized should not now be saddled with “disgraceful wages” and left “impoverished” and uninsured.

Lindsey Criswell, president of the university’s Sociology Club, which has established an online petition supporting the housekeepers, said she was “disheartened and surprised” by the cost-cutting move.

Criswell said she transferred to Wittenberg this year because of its “sense of community. It’s not a student factory. People are not treated as commodities (or) merely cogs in a machine.”

The rally was opened and closed by Scott Adkins of Local 75 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which currently represents the housekeepers.

“We’re here to ask the students and faculty to stand up for these workers,” Adkins said. “We need you.”

The Wittenberg Alumni Association has scheduled the university’s first online Alumni Town hall meeting at 8 p.m. Dec. 12 in which Joyner will discuss the state of the university and entertain questions from alumni on campus and in contact through Twitter.