Union membership rises in area

More than 6,000 joined last year, the most in 2 decades

Greater Boston's union movement is swelling, with about 6,359 new members since last Labor Day, the largest roundup of recruits in about two decades.

The growth in the area's union membership is driven by cab drivers, security guards, truck drivers, communications technicians, and home-care assistants. It's too soon to say, but this newfound success in unionizing could mean Greater Boston is bucking a state and national trend of flat or declining membership over the past 20 years as unionized jobs have disappeared due to offshoring, technological advancements, and recession-driven downsizing.

"This could be a turning point in labor history," said James Green, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston who has been teaching history and labor studies since 1977.

In 2007, the Commonwealth's tally of unionized workers dropped to its lowest level in 19 years, sinking to 379,000 members after losing 35,000 of them that year, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the percentage of Massachusetts workers who belonged to unions-- which is a more telling statistic since it adjusts for the state's job losses or gains-- also declined, sliding to 13.2 percent from 14.5 percent in 2006. Nationally, the number and percent of workers who are union members have declined every year for the past two decades, until last year, when the percentage leveled at 12.1 percent, up from the prior year's 12 percent.

The government doesn't break down data to the regional or city levels and no other group keeps accurate track of the Boston area's total union membership. But labor professors say it's significant that so many workers in a variety of fields recently have organized in Boston. In the past year, union drives have succeeded in multiple places, including Verizon Business, United Parcel Service of America Inc.'s division that absorbed Overnite Express, AlliedBarton Security Services, Northeast Security, and Securitas.

"That's a wide spectrum," said Thomas A. Kochan, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management. "It says there's a real thirst for voice and representation among the workforce today."

Rich Rogers, executive secretary-treasurer of the Greater Boston Labor Council, said this is the largest number of new members in the Greater Boston area since the late 1980s, when 3,500 Harvard University employees formed the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers. He said the new success is also due to "savvy union leadership utilizing innovative tactics and strategies" to get around the antiquated 1930s labor laws that were designed for industrial workforces and the cumbersome, lengthy National Labor Relations Act procedures that, among other things, require a 45-day waiting period before workers can vote to unionize.

For instance, Greater Boston's 3,514 personal-care assistants, who are hired by disabled or elderly people to work in their homes, historically weren't allowed to form a union because they didn't share the same employer or workplace. But new legislation in 2006 created a common employer for these home-care assistants, who total 22,000 statewide, and last November allowed them to vote, through a mail-in ballot, in favor of forming a union.

Similarly, Boston's 1,200 taxi drivers and 1,500 security guards in Boston and Cambridge weren't granted collective bargaining rights through the National Labor Relations Board. So some union organizers took their case to the community, holding rallies in front of clients' offices and rounding up prominent pastors and politicians to write newspaper opinion pieces and appeal to employers to give their workers the rights to unionize.

With the 50 local freight drivers and dock workers, UPS agreed to recognize them as a union if the majority of workers signed authorization cards, rather than requiring that to be the precursor to an official National Labor Relations Board election.

And about 95 local Verizon Business technicians were granted admittance into a union as a settlement to an arbitration case that union officials filed against the company. The case claimed another Verizon division's union contract prohibited the nonunion technicians from performing the same type of work.

While many of these unionization efforts took creative twists, they still taxed organizers and employees.

Verizon Business senior technician David Rogol of Holden used three vacation days last spring to attend the annual shareholder meeting in Lincoln, Neb. There, he asked the chief executive why Verizon treats them like "third-class citizens"-- paying them $20,000 less than their counterparts in other divisions and offering healthcare that costs them each $5,000 a year while their counterparts receive it for free-- and why the company refuses to recognize their signed authorization cards in favor of a union.

"We respect employees' rights to be in a union" Verizon Business spokesman Peter Lucht told the Globe. But the company wants employees to hold secret-ballot elections, as outlined by the law, so they "are not subject to any coercion," Lucht said.

Rogol said unionizing is "an intimidating process," one he didn't want to take on during most of his eight years at Verizon Business, which was formerly known as WorldCom and then MCI. "At that stage in my career, I wanted to improve myself, and I was a company man," said Rogol, now a 40-year-old husband and father of 10- and 16-year-old sons. "But once I realized that didn't get me anywhere, I really had no alternative."

Nicole C. Wong can be reached at nwong@globe.com.