At UC Berkeley, they supported a strike by campus clerical workers. Across the bay, they rallied with Stanford Medical Center janitors on an outsourcing work issue. And at Harvard, a student sit-in led to better pay for campus custodians.

College students across the nation are joining labor causes, fighting for those who grade their papers, clean their dorms and make the sweatshirts bearing their university’s logo. Labor officials see the renewed interest in organizing at universities as a positive sign for the future of labor, which has been steadily losing membership and influence.

Only 13.5 percent of wage and salary workers were union members in 2001, unchanged from the previous year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That compares with a high of 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year the bureau began tracking such data.

“We’re seeing a new generation of higher social consciousness,” said Art Pulaski, the executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO. “The new generation is moving away from the ‘me’ and into an ‘us’ sense of service and justice.”

Others, however, aren’t sure if the recent wave of student activism on college campuses will revitalize labor in the long run. Despite labor’s outreach to immigrant workers, women, workers of color and students, few young people belong to unions.

UNION MEMBERSHIP NUMBERS

Few statistics are available on the extent of union participation among college-aged youths. The Bureau of Labor Statistics comes closest to providing an accurate picture in its tracking of union membership annually by age group, beginning with 16- to 24-year-olds.

According to the bureau, 5.2 percent of about 20 million people in the 16-to-24 age category in 2001 belonged to unions, compared with 9.1 percent in 1983.

That same pattern was evident among workers between the ages of 25 and 34. According to the bureau, 15.1 percent of about 27 million people in this category were union members, down from 23.1 percent in 1983.

A recent survey by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO showed that interest in union membership may be growing. Asked if they would vote for union representation, 58 percent of workers ages 18 to 34 said yes.

Even so, labor is still perceived as largely out of step with the daily concerns of young people and young workers, said Raj Jayadev, editor of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a Web magazine devoted to improving working conditions in Silicon Valley.

According to Jayadev, young people are more in tune with organizing on the streets and in their neighborhoods around issues such as redevelopment and police brutality. Indeed, he noted that they are connecting with grassroots movements in their own communities as opposed to the traditional labor movement that’s so familiar to previous generations.

“It’s going to have to go to the interests of young people, which means respecting the total person, not just what happens to them 9 to 5,” he said.

‘SEEDS OF CHANGE’

Carol Zabin, chairwoman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at UC Berkeley, said organized labor is taking an active political role on university campuses in a way that it hasn’t in 30 years.

Zabin said the kind of youth organizing that has been taking place on policy or education issues will eventually come around to work issues.

“The challenge is for young people to work within labor to change it,” she said. “It’s an imperfect movement, but they’re realizing that it does have seeds of change in it. The only way it’s going to live up to its potential is having young people look for spaces where change is possible and not be too idealistic about it.”

In recent years, many young people have begun to work within labor’s ranks. Students are applying for the AFL-CIO’s national union summer program, a four-week internship that puts young people on the front lines of organizing.

This year, there were nearly 500 applications for 150 slots. The number of applications has been growing every year since the program started in 1996.

The AFL-CIO’s Organizing Institute program, a paid training program for people who want to become full-time organizers, also has funneled young people into labor-organizing positions. The labor summer programs at UCLA and UC Berkeley are attracting dozens of undergraduate and graduate students—many of them minorities or children of immigrants—who want to learn more about the labor movement and work with local unions or community organizations.

Marla James, a UC Berkeley student, helped to organize Oakland’s African American home health-care workers during her eight-week summer labor stint. She’s continuing her project throughout the school year.

The political science major said the work represents her chance to give something back to the community. “You can see yourself as part of something bigger,” James said.

MORE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

Daisy Rooks, a doctoral student at UCLA who works with the Organizing Institute, was motivated by what she saw as a more progressive labor movement. She started working with labor unions after graduating from college and working in low-wage, no-benefit jobs.

“It didn’t seem like a viable alternative, but now it really does,” said Rooks, who researches the problems unions are facing in retaining young organizers. “With the economic situation the way it is, I think it’s prompting people to organize unions in their own workplace.”

While there has been a big jump in young people becoming union organizers, there has not been a huge surge in young people forming unions at their workplaces, said Stuart Tannock, a lecturer in the UC Berkeley School of Education.

“There have been some exciting developments, but there are some big gaps left,” said Tannock, who collaborates with Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education. “It’s easy for labor to pat itself on the back and say,

‘Wow, we’ve got some new people.’ But if labor can’t organize a new generation of workers, it won’t have relevance.”