New York is union territory. After all, 100 years ago a strike among the city’s sweatshop workers spurred the rise of the national labor movement, and today local unions leaders continue to be a political force.

However, new, recently released federal statistics render this common assumption more uncertain. New York is also the city in which the percentage of unionized workers has suddenly dropped, falling five times more than the national average last year.

New York state continues to be the most unionized state in the nation, one out of four workers are union members, according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, unions have been losing ground. In 1990, 28 percent of workers were unionized, in 2001 the rate fell to 26.4 percent, and last year it reached 25.3 percent. At the national level, the percentage of unionized workers fell from 13.4 percent to 13.2 percent.

Analysts believe that the high percentage decrease signifies that the unions have lost more employees proportionately in the national recession. More likely, the union base suffered a sudden erosion following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, which caused the city’s heavily unionized hospitality industry to fall into hard times.

“I’m looking for another decent job, but there aren’t any decent jobs around any more,” says Victor Severino, who worked as a waiter at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center. In New York state, the number of union members dropped by 76,000, and today they total slightly under two million. Only California has more union members (2.5 million), but these represent only 17.5 percent of the workforce.

The drop in registered union workers in New York is immediately striking; meanwhile, by contrast, the total number of employees is rising, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. This data is contested by Stephen Kagan, chief economist for Gov. George Pataki, who believes that the bureau uses imperfect methods to calculate the total employment numbers. According to Kagann, total employment is also decreasing in New York.

The Labor Bureau has not provided data on New York’s industrial sector, where unions have lost members. However, analysts confirm that the recession was particularly damaging in this regard among industries already strongly unionized, principally manufacturing and air transport.

David Denholm of the Public Service Research Foundation confirms that many unionized positions have been lost in the city’s hotel sector, which is dependent on the flow of tourism, and among restaurants which were left half-empty after the destruction of the World Trade Center.

Victor Severino, who lost many of his former colleagues from Windows on the World, began looking for a new restaurant position after a few months of inactivity. He found a job that is nonunionized and which pays him less than half of what he formerly earned, and he is still seeking more lucrative work.

New York City stands out as a bastion of unionization, and it still remains in a heavily unionized state. The first Labor Day was observed in the city in 1882. The epoch-making strikes of 1909 and 1910 by garment workers, who were almost all new immigrants including many women and minorities, contributed to salary raises and less onerous working hours. In 1962, after only one day, the city’s teachers’ strike brought about the nation’s first all-inclusive contract for teachers.

Teachers, hospital workers, and assembly line workers are almost entirely unionized and continue to have considerable political clout. One of the unions whose endorsement was most desired in last year’s elections for governor was Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union, which has 237,000 members. Pataki obtained the endorsement and won the election, conferring to Local 1199 President Dennis Rivera the reputation of a great union strategist.

“You can ask every political leader in the state whether the union movement has lost some of its power. I think that you’ll get the appropriate response,” said Mario Cilento, spokesperson for the state AFL-CIO.

In the past years, unions have lost members in the manufacturing sector, but have gained them in the public sector, affirmed Cilento. Richard Hurd, professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University, also observes that if on the one hand the level of unionization decreased in the last year, one finds that the same level existed in 1999. Hurd warns against taking the highs and lows of one year as the gospel truth, saying, “These things rise and fall together with the economy.”