For Wallace Mortimer Jones of East Flatbush, making more money meant climbing up just two floors.

He worked as a guard for more than six years in the basement-level loading docks at a Rockefeller Center building, where he earned $7 an hour when he left in 2001.

"It felt kind of unfair to know ... you're doing so much for so little," said Jones, 53.
But now that he has a union security job in the building's lobby, Jones earns $18.79 an hour, plus health insurance and a 401K plan. The real difference isn't the floor he's on, but the union job, he said.

Jones' work history illustrates the finding of a report on unions issued for the 40th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis, where he had gone not for a civil rights rally, but in support of a sanitation workers' strike.

The Washington, D.C.-based Center for Economic and Policy Research found African-American union workers' wages between 2004 and 2007 were on average 12% higher than nonunion African-Americans' wages.

African-Americans in unions were more likely to have health insurance and have a pension plan, as well, the study said.

"Unions have a proud tradition of helping African-Americans and other ethnic groups climb out of poverty," said Mike Fishman, president of Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, the largest private-sector union in New York City.

Security jobs are dominated by African-American workers, according to union officials, who estimated the metro area has 66,000 security workers, the majority of whom are nonunion.

Jerome Carter, 35, of Bedford-Stuyvesant, didn't have to change jobs to see the difference a union can make at his position, working security at the PATH station in Jersey City's Journal Square.

As a union member, the father of four now makes a better salary - $1.75 an hour more - and gets benefits, he said, allowing him to save for retirement.

"I get respect on the job," Carter said. "My pride has been mended."

For an East Flatbush security guard who didn't want to be named for fear of retribution from his employer, supporting his wife and a 5-year-old child on his nonunion salary is impossible. He brings home about $200 less a month than he pays in rent for a two-bedroom apartment.

He has worked nights as a painter. Right now, he's struggling. "I don't have a second job," he said. "It's very hard."