Changing Attitudes on Labor Color Bay Area Transit Dispute Jason Henry for The New York Times About 400,000 people use the system every day, with most commuting to San Francisco from Oakland and other suburbs. State law gives the transit workers the right to strike. 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." Union supporters attended a public hearing about the contract dispute last week. Pay raises and pensions are two of the main issues. 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. Union membership and support for labor remain higher in this state, and especially in the Bay Area, than in most of the rest of the country. But unions have lost backing here, as in the rest of the country, labor experts say. People are less inclined to view labor's gains as those of the wider public's, they say, particularly as many have suffered reductions in wages and benefits in the past half decade. Ms. Jorgensen had a similar view. "Given the economy, I think the unionized people should be breaking even, not necessarily getting ahead," she said. There are a lot of workers out there who don't even have a union or a pension or health care benefits. On Friday, Gov. Jerry Brown said he would impose a 60-day cooling-off period in the negotiations if both sides failed to reach an agreement by Sunday night, guaranteeing service for the next couple of months. But if no progress is made in the talks, the decision could simply postpone a strike until October, when more commuters will be back at work and students return to class; then, the economic impact on the Bay Area would be greater. Last Sunday, Mr. Brown appointed a fact-finding panel charged with submitting a report on the dispute, averting a strike at the last minute. BART's management and its two largest unions, the Service Employees International Union and the Amalgamated Transit Union, resumed negotiating on Thursday, a day after a public hearing showed how far apart the two sides stood on crucial issues - so far that they could not even agree on how many tens of millions of dollars separated them from a deal. Mark Stillman, 54, who worked as a mechanical engineer before suffering a disability, was one of many BART users at the hearing, during which both sides presented their positions to the fact-finding panel. He described himself as a union supporter, but said the BART unions needed to "modernize." The BART employees" public pensions - to which employees make no contribution - should be closer to what workers in the private sector get, he said. "I think their pensions are too protected and idealistic," Mr. Stillman said. If you look at commercial businesses and companies, the employees are more responsible for their pensions. The BART employees don't pay anything into their pensions, and I think they ought to be assuming more of the risk. BART negotiators are asking workers to start pension contributions, with the share increasing annually over a four-year contract; they are offering a 9 percent pay raise over four years. The unions are demanding a 15 percent raise over three years and an additional 6.5 percent raise the first year as a condition for making pension contributions. "This is just another example of the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer," said Dana McMillan, 42, who was at the MacArthur BART station with her twin daughters in a double stroller. The people working at BART are homeowners. Malia Wollan contributed reporting.