Opposition to Mayor Bob Duffy's mayoral control proposal began as a slow burn. Many community and advocacy groups didn't react immediately; and neither did leaders of the teachers union.

Make no mistake, though: Rochester Teachers Association officials bitterly oppose mayoral control and have since launched a full-scale campaign against the change, which would make the school district a city department with the superintendent reporting to the mayor. The elected School Board would be dismantled and replaced with an appointed advisory board.

The union's getting involved for a couple of reasons. For one, this is a change that would directly affect its members, says RTA President Adam Urbanski. He believes Duffy wants mayoral control so he can reduce the amount of money the city gives to the school district, Urbanski says.To do that, though, Duffy would have to find a way around the state Maintenance of Effort law, which requires the city to give the school district a certain amount every year.  

There's a misconception about his union, Urbanski says: that it only cares about teachers. The reality, he says, is that the union represents its teacher members, who often care the most about their students' needs and chances for success.

Unions have two roles, Urbanski says. They ensure fairness and due process for their members - in the RTA's case that means securing a good contract and making sure teachers aren't improperly disciplined or fired. The other role is ensuring the success of their respective industries - in the RTA's case, that's public education.

"We want to see the schools be more successful and we know they can be more successful with more funding," Urbanski says.

Unions are facing a struggle with public opinion. They're still viewed by some as the champions of the working class, but others see them as economic detriments, or worse. Some say that union members act entitled, that unions are special interests that increase the cost of doing business, and that unions burden taxpayers.

Just like it has across the state and country, union membership in Monroe County has been decreasing - in the past five years, membership has declined from approximately 65,000 to approximately 60,000, says Jim Bertolone, president of the Rochester and Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation. Numbers were slipping because of a decline in manufacturing jobs and increasingly tight government budgets. Then came the recent recession, which caused more job losses - construction and building trades were especially hard hit.

As leaders like Urbanski and Bertolone are quick to point out, there are plenty of battles for unions to fight - from workplace safety to health-care reform, not to mention bread-and-butter issues like fair pay and extending unemployment insurance. For those reasons and others, they dismiss criticisms that unions, in this time of minimum wages, standardized work weeks, and labor laws have become irrelevant and unnecessary. Wages and benefits are better overall, they say, in places with higher levels of union representation.

In the mid 1950s, labor unions enjoyed a 75 percent public-approval rating in a Gallup Poll. By August 2009, however, that figure had dropped to 48 percent. In a Zogby survey conducted last year, 49 percent of the respondents said they thought unions were not good for the economy.

Labor leaders are keenly aware that public opinion is increasingly against them, particularly when it comes to public employees unions. Public employees make up a slim majority of all union members nationally, says a report released in January by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The anti-union sentiment is often promulgated through the media, where pundits and commentators say that unions drive up the cost of government and the cost of doing business. They playto notions that unions act entitled and that they're special interests - the latter is a particular irritation to union leaders, who say they simply represent working people.

"You would think the workers caused the Great Recession here, and not casino capitalism on Wall Street," Bertolone says.

Why does public opinion matter? Because unions are founded on the idea of strength in numbers - that by showing solidarity they can have more clout with powerful employers. If fewer people think joining a union is a good idea, that's a problem. And if public sympathy isn't with workers trying to win pay increases, benefits, or better working conditions, it can make it harder to sell those ideas to an employer.

Here are some of the losses that labor leaders say unions have faced in the past decade:

• When Valeo closed, 3,000 union workers lost their jobs.
• The number of unionized manufacturing jobs at Xerox dropped from 7,000 to 1,000.
• There are now less than 1,000 workers at the former Rochester Products facility, now Delphi.
• The work force at Hickey Freeman, which is unionized, is down by about 200 workers since the start of the recession.

Dave Young, business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union No. 86, says the number of his members working in manufacturing is down from 200 around the start of the decade to less than 100 people.

Declining numbers make advocacy work more difficult, Bertolone says, because the leaders depend on their members not just to set the agenda, but to rally for a cause.

"It's our members lobbying and sending letters and e-mails and making phones calls to these elected representatives," Bertolone says. "If just union bosses call, it's nothing, but if 100 of my members call their congressman or write their congressman, that gets noticed. And again, it's grassroots."

And they are sometimes up against stiff competition, he says, including the companies with which they have to bargain.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled that election contribution limits cannot be placed on corporations and labor unions. That sounds like unions were freed up to spend enormous sums of cash on elections, but that's not exactly the case.

Laws governing union operations prohibit the organizations from spending member dues on political contributions. That money has to be voluntarily given by members for that specific purpose. And the typical union member can't afford to make large political contributions.

The money that unions contribute in elections is not negligible - particularly in state and national elections, where larger unions are involved. But it all comes from individual workers.

A New York Public Interest Research Group report that studied political contributions in the two-year cycle leading up to the 2008 state legislative races showed that unions spent an estimated $13.4 million on those elections. That sounds like a lot, but unions gave less than individuals and corporations. In fact, corporations spent almost three times as much as unions - $38.7 million. Corporations and unions are both more likely to donate to incumbents, the report says.

That's not to say union resources are negligible. Another NYPIRG analysis, based on 2008 figures, put New York State United Teachers, a 600,000-member statewide federation of 1,200 teachers unions, as one of the top spenders overall on lobbying and campaign contributions - it spent $2.1 million on lobbying and $714,047 on political contributions. It was second only to Verizon, which spent a total of $3.4 million on lobbying and campaign contributions.

Local unions typically contribute smaller amounts, like the $100 the Rochester Police Locust Club gave to Sheriff Patrick O'Flynn in June, or the $2,500 the Rochester Regional Joint Board gave to Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Miner - at the time a candidate for the office - also in June. The Joint Board's contributions are often under $200, but do sometimes range in the area of a few thousand dollars.

Labor leaders say they don't have as much money as corporations to spread around, but union members often do get involved as campaign volunteers.

"It's about turnout," says Erin Moody, administrative organizer with the Labor Federation.

As an example of the difference that can make, she points to the election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. An overwhelming majority of voters in the state voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election. But those voters just didn't turn out to vote for Brown's Democratic challenger, Martha Coakley.

Union members are more likely to vote than the general population, and they are also likely to agree with their union's position, says Aron Reina, lead organizer for the Labor Federation.

Local labor put a lot of its focus behind local UAW President Dan Maloney's run for Greece supervisor during the 2009 elections. They campaigned heavily for him and the race was so close that it came down to a recount, says Julie Schmidtke, chair of Next Generation United, a fledgling group devoted to involving younger union members and supporters in the labor movement.

"We made it a question," Schmidtke says. "We started something."

It should be noted, however, that the Town of Greece Police Department was also embroiled in controversy at the time.

Schmidtke is new to the union world, having joined the Office Professional Employees Union when she took a new job a year ago. She got involved with Next Generation United because she wanted to contribute to the labor movement.

She and other young union members realize that, at some point, the people who lead the unions will retire and other members will have to take their place, she says.

"We'd like to think that as a progressive movement, that we can change, that we can adapt to the times, that we can adjust our course to do what we think is right," Schmidtke says.

Part of what that group is focusing on is changing the perception of unions. To show people that unions care about the community, they do volunteer work and offer scholarships, for example.

There's also the issue of message: explaining why fair pay is important or how government bidding requirements protect taxpayers. For too long, anti-union groups have been defining what unions are, Schmidtke says. Unions are doing the right things, she says, they just aren't saying it the right way.

The main message they need to get out: that unions protect their members, they give workers a voice, and they push for standards that are good for workers everywhere, she says.

"I think it's part of a large progressive movement to help all workers," Schmidtke says.