OAKLAND, Calif. — With the threat of a railroad shutdown looming, Alice Jorgensen was at the Bay Area Rapid Transit’s MacArthur Station here on a recent morning, waiting for the service she uses 8 to 10 times a week to run errands and go to the library. A strike, she said, would be “a real inconvenience.”

Like most people in the San Francisco Bay Area, a liberal, Democratic stronghold that has traditionally been supportive of organized labor, she favors unions.

“But I can see how people without unions feel burned because their wages aren’t going up,” said Ms. Jorgensen, 59, who worked as a receptionist in a veterinary clinic until 2005, when a thyroid problem forced her to go on disability. “I’m slightly less pro-union than I was in the past, because I think unions can be so supportive of their members that they are not looking at the entire picture of society.”

The labor dispute at the transit system, known as BART, is taking place against a backdrop of changing attitudes toward organized labor in California.