Last month, the authority was given the power to insure that any union involved in school construction must recruit at least 25 percent of its new apprentices from predominately black and Hispanic graduates of the city's vocational high schools.

At each of 110 sites, the union recruited what they called employee activists to oversee the drives.

Within a year the union had successfully recruited the Cleeve workforce as members.

The union recruited puddlers, skilled craftsmen who manipulated pig iron to create steel.

Not since the 1960's, when unions recruited Federal Government employees for the first time, enlisting tens of thousands, has there been so much innovation in the union movement and talk of change.

To increase the percentage of the work force that is unionized would require unions to recruit one million new members a year, more than twice the current rate of recruitment.

The federation says that unions recruited nearly 400,000 new members last year, but nonetheless, union membership is down by more than 200,000 since early 1996, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Private companies, state agencies, federal agencies, and unions recruit young people to participate in Job Corps, where they can train for and be placed in jobs.

Even the most significant unions could recruit no more than a small fraction of the workers in their industry.

But of course, Union Summer has another purpose: to help unions recruit organizers after a decade in which union membership has fallen and many corporations have treated unions like punching bags.