NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) – Union organizers at Yale University know it’s hard to generate sympathy for Ivy League graduate students, many whom get free tuition and health care and are paid up to $25,000 a year to teach.

The union rallying the students, UNITE/HERE, built its reputation organizing garment workers, mostly women and immigrants who endured long hours and meager pay in textile mills. Yalies, with undergraduate degrees from topflight colleges and the promise of bright futures, don’t garner the same feelings.

It’s the same story in Washington, where a union is courting Microsoft employees, and in New York, where organizers are drumming up support at IBM.

“They have a good enough deal. They shouldn’t complain,” said Marcus Courtney, president of the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, echoing the refrain organizers so often hear.

With American manufacturing jobs disappearing, many union leaders say they must organize high-tech workers and academics to survive. But organizers are finding that to rally a white-collar work force, they can’t follow the 20th-century story line pitting workers and their numbers against businessmen and their money.

Today’s union drives require organizers to change the way the public views white-collar workers. Many see unions as something that trucker drivers and telephone linesmen need but software engineers do not. Increasingly, union leaders are finding that workers feel that way, too.

“The modern white-collar work force in America brings a tremendous amount of skepticism when it comes to organized labor, and it’s an obstacle we face every day,” said Courtney, a former contract worker for Microsoft.

“People have this idea, and they’ve been told this, that they have an education and a skill level and that’s your negotiating power. Speaking with one voice, having a way to collectively address common issues with employers, that’s something workers needed to do in 1900 but not something they need to do in 2000.”

Changing that perception is a top priority. With fewer than 200 of IBM’s 133,000 U.S. workers paying dues last year, the New York-based Alliance at IBM is hardly ready to push for recognition.

Instead, they are talking about jobs being outsourced overseas and about declining pension values. In Silicon Valley and Washington, unions talk about the growing use of part-time contract work. At video game companies, it’s about grueling hours.

At Yale, organizers face an uphill battle to win recognition. The National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that teaching assistants at private schools are not workers and cannot form a union. The only way to win recognition would be for administrators to voluntarily grant it, something they have refused to do.

Despite those obstacles, teaching assistants went on strike last week, picketing to publicize their issues. They talked about how universities increasingly rely on them to teach, tutor and grade undergraduates. The students demanded better medical coverage for their families and a way to raise work concerns with their bosses.

“We’re at the forefront of organizing the new economy,” said Lee Conrad, national coordinator for the Alliance at IBM, a New York-based subsidiary of the Communication Workers of America. “We’re bringing up the issues that are important.”

The union brass also needs to persuade their blue-collar base that high-tech workers face the same issues – job exportation, increased workloads and the rising cost of health care – as people in the service industries.

That, too, has been a struggle, Courtney said, as some veteran union bosses stick to the idea that the only workers who really need a union are the low-wage laborers.

“In the labor movement, we can’t afford to pick and choose,” Courtney said. “It’s not just about narrow issues like how much you get paid. It’s about broader political issues. It’s about fairness.”

With 13 million members, the AFL-CIO took in $184 million last year and remains a potent force in labor and politics. But membership has declined by nearly 200,000 in the past four years and receipts are down $11 million.

As they fight the exportation of manufacturing jobs, major unions are investing more money in groups organizing white-collar workers. They helped WashTech, the group trying to organize at Microsoft, raise more than $442,000 last year despite having fewer than 500 dues-paying workers.

“I think it’s critically important, not just for the labor movement but for the country, that we figure out how to unionize those jobs,” said John Wilhelm, president of UNITE/HERE, who rallied with striking Yale teaching assistants last week.

That’s why union leaders haven’t given up on Yale, where despite a decade of organization efforts, there were no dues-paying graduate students last year.

“If highly educated students at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions all of a sudden collectively decide, We need an organized voice,’ what are they figuring out that other workers need to figure out?” Courtney said. “What got them to that point. That’s a key thing. That can inspire the labor movement.”

AP-ES-04-23-05 1700EDT