ENOSBURG, Vt.—When the union representatives first came knocking at Audra Rondeau’s door in this rural part of the state, near the Canadian border, she turned them away.

They wanted her to join an effort to organize Vermont’s 7,000 or so home-care workers. But Rondeau had been raised with a healthy skepticism about unions: Her 93-year-old grandmother, who she says “still scares the beans out of me,” has a strong aversion to labor organizing.

But then they came back, and this time they asked Rondeau what she’d want changed in the home-care industry, where she works taking care of two young girls, one with autism and one with severe depression.

“They said, ‘What’s irritating you about the program you’re in?’ And I just started going off,” said Rondeau, who is 47, as she potted a plant in her kitchen, in the house she built herself.

The state kept cutting funding for programs, putting her clients in danger, she told them. Without anyone to look after them, her clients might not be able to feed themselves or get out of the house. She also made less as a home-care worker than she did when she started thirty years ago, and there was so much red tape around billing that it was sometimes hard to get paid.

They listened and came back again, and this time, they invited her to ride along with them to visit other home-care workers. One man she visited had quit his job to care for his ailing parents and lived in a trailer with them—all three huddled under blankets because they didn’t have enough money to pay for heat.

“I went riding around with Bill, and started seeing the conditions that everyone else was dealing with, and I was like, yeah, this has got to change,” she said.

The organizers eventually succeeded, getting home-care workers to vote last fall to form Vermont Homecare United, an affiliate of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Being in a union has changed a lot of things for home-care workers, even skeptics like Rondeau.

The union negotiated its first contract with the state of Vermont in June of this year, bringing in a wage bump to workers. Some had been making the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, the new contract bumped them up to $10.80. Those who were making more than minimum wage got a 2.5 percent pay increase, and those who worked long, overnight shifts also got a slight pay raise.

“It’s made a big difference—I’ve got an extra $80 a week in my paycheck,” Rondeau said. “It’s enough to keep me happy for now.”

The experience of Vermont’s home-care workers is a unique one: In many states around the country, union membership is shrinking and unions’ bargaining power is being eroded. In Vermont, 13.2 percent of workers were represented by unions in 2013, up from 11.7 percent a decade ago. By contrast, in Michigan, once a big union state, 16.9 percent of workers are represented by a union, down from 23 percent a decade ago. In Ohio, only 14.1 percent were represented by a union, down from 18.1 percent a decade ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Percentage of Workers Represented by a Union, by State

“The feeling for many workers in Vermont is that there won’t be retribution by employers if they vote to join a union,” said Gary Chaison, a professor of industrial relations at Clark University. “It would be a lot different in South Carolina or Texas.”

Indeed, unions suffered a bruising blow in February, when workers at a VW plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee voted not to join the United Auto Workers: The union alleged workers were worried the company would locate a new plant elsewhere if they joined.

But even those represented by unions in other states have not been able to gain the pay raises the home-care workers achieved in Vermont. In Wisconsin, for example, Act 10, passed in 2011 by Governor Scott Walker, severely curtailed the power of public-employee unions to bargain collectively. Since that law was passed, teachers’ salaries in many districts have been frozen, membership in state employees’ union has dropped significantly, and with it, union coffers.

A Michigan right-to-work law went into effect in early 2013, mandating that unions cannot require members to pay dues, which experts say could have a big effect on the state’s representation when current contracts expire.

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