LABOR : Union Pioneers Home-Buying Aid for Members : Innovative employer-financed trust fund was won under threat of strike.

In the decades after World War II, labor unions built their power on their ability to get things for their members--higher wages, stronger work rules, better health insurance, a federal job-safety agency. These days, by contrast, a labor leader is considered a success if he can simply make sure his members don’t lose what they have.

Which is why Domenic Bozzotto, the gruff president of Boston’s 5,000-member hotel workers’ union, has become a hero.

Sometime this month, Bozzotto’s Local 26 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant EmployeesInternational Union will make its first home mortgage loan to one of its members. The money comes from a new employer-funded trust that Local 26 won in collective bargaining with 13 of Boston’s biggest hotels two years ago.

This may sound neat and clean and logical, but it is, in fact, an unprecedented extension of the role labor unions have played in their members’ lives. It took years of sweat and muscle. It even took the approval of the U.S. Congress.

Today, a growing number of unions are looking at what Bozzotto’s local accomplished. Some of the stronger ones are thinking about making the creation of a housing trust fund one of their demands the next time a contract comes due. They recognize that it is a classic example of the kind of innovative benefits unions need to offer to attract new members and strengthen the often-sagging enthusiasm of their current ones.

“Getting unions back into the community, that’s where their effectiveness has always been,” said Bruce Marks, Bozzotto’s housing finance expert.

What happened in Boston grew out of a low-income-housing shortage that parallels the experience of Los Angeles and many other urban centers. The real estate market boomed while the wages of hourly workers failed to keep up with the pace of inflation. The chances of a $300-a-week hotel worker’s qualifying for a home--even with a working spouse--became increasingly scant.

Bozzotto’s local had worked for years for a contract clause that would require hotels to contribute to a housing fund. The union circulated an elaborate brochure contrasting the wealth of the executives and corporations that own Boston’s hotels with the shortage of affordable homes and the mounting loss of rental apartments to condominium conversion.

Finally, in late 1988, after the union threatened a strike, the hotels signed on. They agreed to contribute 5 cents for every hour worked by every employee to a housing trust fund. That meant about $500,000 a year.

The trouble was that federal labor law prohibited negotiating this kind of trust. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed by Congress in 1947 to curb the power of labor unions, had not included it as a permissible topic of bargaining.

Bozzotto could not count on the AFL-CIO to help change the law because national labor leaders have traditionally opposed amending Taft-Hartley, fearful that, if the law was ever “opened up” in Congress, new anti-labor provisions might be inserted.

But, with the assistance of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), the amendment was introduced and passed by the Senate in late 1989. By last spring, enough support had been mustered to assure House passage and the signature of President Bush.

Bozzotto hadn’t been idle. As soon as the new contract had been signed, Local 26 created the Union Neighborhood Assistance Corp., which eventually expanded to a staff of 12. The assistance group acted as a clearinghouse for information on state and local housing assistance programs. So far, it has helped more than 50 families move into apartments or homes.

Local 26 expects to be able to begin disbursing loans from the trust fund, which has now grown to about $1 million, this month. Typically, it will make loans or grants for part of a mortgage.

“Say you have two parents working, $35,000 income, two kids, paying rent of $850,” said Marks, executive director of the housing assistance corporation. “They have not had the ability to save the money for a down payment. We’re able to give them a grant or a long-term loan.

“We have other people who have the savings for the down payment but not the income to qualify. We can provide the money to ‘buy down’ the interest rate from 10% to 7%” to lower the monthly mortgage payment, Marks said.

Bozzotto has some advice for other unions that want to bring this idea to the bargaining table: Bring some leverage.

“When other unions say to us, ‘Can you tell us what to do?’ we remind them that we worked on this for five years,” he said. The real success, he said, was that “we were able to negotiate this without giving something else away.”