Carrying protest signs in a drizzling rain, Winona McCullough and Sophya Eydenson spent another day on the picket line outside the Syms clothing store in Rockville yesterday, part of a group of employees striking over health care benefits.

“Health care is a very important issue for us,” said McCullough, 60, who passed out fliers to customers entering the store on Chapman Avenue. She has worked in the women’s department for three years. “It’s the most important issue,” added 64-year-old Eydenson, a 15-year Syms veteran who now works in the children’s department.

Currently Syms, along with other employers, contributes to a trust fund for health care benefits that is jointly administered by union and company representatives. While Syms’s management has not proposed changing the cost or quality of employee health coverage, it has proposed having the company alone manage the health plan.

The Syms dispute demonstrates the increasing willingness of unions to take a stand on the health care issue in recent negotiations.

General Electric Co. on Sunday announced a settlement with two large unions, averting another possible strike. About 17,500 GE employees staged a two-day walkout in January—the first national strike at the company in more than 30 years—in response to the company’s decision to make employees bear more of the health care burden.

Who pays for health care also is expected to be a key issue in negotiations between Verizon Communications Inc. and its unions and between automakers and the United Auto Workers.

“Health care is the number one issue in most bargaining this year, and the reason is because of the dramatic increase in the cost of providing health benefits in the last couple years,” Rick Banks, director of collective bargaining for the AFL-CIO, said in an interview. “I think most unions are doing a pretty good job, given the terrible economic climate we have, of preserving those benefits.”

Tom McNutt, chairman of the negotiating team for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local 400, which represents 125 Syms employees, said company officials “made an egregious claim that they can duplicate current benefit at a lower cost, and never produced contracts with provisions that ensure that our members will receive the same benefits.”

John Tyzbir, vice president of human resources at Syms, said that steeply rising health care costs prompted the proposal. He said Syms has provided benefits booklets and new sample contracts for the union to review.

“Historically, larger companies provided health insurance,” said Ken Jacobs, a labor policy specialist at the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California at Berkeley. “You see this rise—retail’s probably the strongest—of employers providing fewer and fewer benefits, using the public health care system as a backstop, while public funding for health care is in a crisis.”

GE, whose total health care costs have risen 45 percent to $1.4 billion in 2002 from $965 million in 1999, increased annual employee co-payments from around $500 a year to $700 a year, a company spokesman said.

The tentative agreement announced Sunday would slightly increase employee health care costs but kept the percentage that workers pay about the same, according to company and union officials. “The company originally sought to reduce what they paid for workers’ health care from 83 percent to 70 percent,” said Edward Fire, president of the International Union of Electronic Workers-Communications Workers of America, the largest union in negotiations with GE. “We were able to beat back that demand and essentially hold the line in terms of who pays what for health care.”

There have been other recent walkouts in which health care was an issue: About 3,000 employees at Hershey Foods Corp. participated in a 44-day strike last year, janitors in Boston went out for three weeks in October, and Lockheed Martin Corp. machinists struck for two weeks in April, before the two sides agreed on health and pension plans.