St. Louis activists who aren’t in a coma know that there’s a big rally in front of Roy Blunt’s Clayton office this Thursday from 4:30 to 5:30. I have the backstory that explains how important this rally is.

The short answer is that it is part of a campaign to change the course of the debt ceiling brouhaha, a campaign that mirrors a stunningly successful state effort in Missouri last spring and that, at a national level, is already paying dividends in the way Democrats in Washington are starting to stand up in the debt ceiling negotiations.

Let me explain that statewide campaign, and then I’ll show you how it applies to Roy Blunt and to Congress.

Jobs with Justice and Pro-Vote coordinated a labor campaign last spring that stopped dead in the lege every anti-labor bill. Their success at cutting cold the progress on Right-to-Work-for-Less and Paycheck Protection Deception was inspiring. The campaign succeeded because ALL the labor stakeholders in the state, including the MNEA, signed on and coordinated their efforts, even to the point of a nightly conference call. The unions targeted districts where the Republican legislator might be swayed, arranging phone banks and door to door canvasses. We don’t have Republican money, but we have the values people like, if we get out there and communicate with the voters. And that’s what the labor unions, unified as never before, did.

At first, the effort was to stop Right-to-Work-for-Less; but mid-session, the Republicans gave that up and pushed Paycheck Deception. A moment of panic set in when the switch was recognized, but the campaign simply changed targets, using the same strategy and tactics. I wrote about a union man, Bryan Wucher, who took eight weeks off from his job at Dierberg’s to canvass. Here’s my understanding from him of the two components of Paycheck Deception:

First, it would have levied a fee against every member of a public employee union. The unions would have had to pay, for each member, a sum that was a percentage of the employee’s dues or else $8, depending on which was less. AND, just so you know that this was not about raising revenues for the state but about punishing unions, note that the unions would have been forbidden to raise their dues by $8 per member to compensate for the loss. The point was to deplete political action funds for those unions.

(…….)

[T]he second problem with Paycheck Deception was that it required public employee union members, every year, to reauthorize the use of their dues for political purposes. What you do, if you’re a Republican legislator, is just keep chipping away at people’s rights: whether it has to do with unions, abortion, or voting. Set up barriers and institute bureaucratic red tape. Freedom my sweet patootie. They are not about freedom.

Consider that only about a third of the state reps are Democrats and yet that every anti-labor bill, including Paycheck Deception, was stopped, and you get a sense of how impressive that coordinated campaign was. One Republican rep called the campaigners and complained that his office couldn’t handle any more phone calls from disgruntled constituents. Call off your dogs, he said; I’ll vote against the bill.

Now let’s see how that same strategy is being applied at the national level. Four to six weeks ago, Claire McCaskill was asserting that there was no way raising tax revenues could be part of the discussion. Now she’s changed her mind. She wants tax revenues on the table. She’s one vivid example of the shift in Democratic rhetoric. President Obama and the Democratic leadership is now insisting that some new tax revenue must be part of the negotiations. Their stance has shifted.

Why did Claire see the light? Part of the reason is that two hundred people showed up at her office for a rally last month urging her to protect Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security and to protect the jobs of the most vulnerable. That was a goodly number, and they made enough noise to impress Claire, as Rabbi Susan Talve reported when she emerged from the meeting inside:

Claire can’t do this by herself. She needs us out here raising our voices. When we were sitting in there and we heard you out here chanting, the whole room lifted up. And you know what? She got energized. We could hear her saying, “Yes, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and the jobs of the most vulnerable workers. I will protect those.”

This is all part of a grassroots effort, sometimes obvious as in the case of the June rally, sometimes happening with quieter pressure. And we must also put pressure on Republicans as well, just as Jobs with Justice and Pro-Vote did last spring over the anti-labor bills. Roy Blunt is less an ideologue than a pragmatist, and he needs to feel some heat, baby.

So I’m not just urging you to get to 7700 Bonhomme at 4:30–or whenever you can get there from work–on Thursday. Yes, do that. And do one more little thing: Find. Five. Friends. Be there with your friends to shout that he should stop giving us a raw deal, supporting as he does tax breaks for the very rich and for corporations.

We need way more than 200 people for this one.

Bryan Wucher (pronounced wooker) just took eight weeks off from his job at Dierbergs Supermarkets. His union contract allows him to do that if he is taking the time out in order to educate voters. And did he ever educate a lot of them. Wucher has been knocking on doors in St. Charles County, Wildwood, Pacific, and South St. Louis County, to name a few of the locations.  He worked from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., usually six days a week. In all weathers. He was deprived of time with his wife, who teaches, and his two young sons. His wife had to take up a lot of slack at home, but she understood and did it cheerfully. Now that the legislative session is over and Missourians are more or less safe from Republicans for another seven months, he can go back to work at Dierbergs. It’s going to seem cushy after what he’s been doing.

He and other AFL-CIO workers started by talking to people about the Right-to-Work (for Less) bills that the Corpublicans were pushing. When it became obvious that that attack was going nowhere in this legislative session, the union workers began educating people about the Paycheck Protection Deception bill.

Wucher laid out for me its two basic requirements. First, it would have levied a fee against every member of a public employee union. The unions would have had to pay, for each member, a sum that was a percentage of the employee’s dues or else $8, depending on which was less. AND, just so you know that this was not about raising revenues for the state but about punishing unions, note that the unions would have been forbidden to raise their dues by $8 per member to compensate for the loss. The point was to deplete political action funds for those unions. So the lege was talking about taxing teachers, policemen, firefighters and a host of people in other helpful professions, like nursing and social work, if they worked for public entities.

Let me say it again: this was not about getting funds for the state. It was about ideology. It was pure partisanship to try to grab money from unions even as Republicans shoveled state funds into the hands of businessmen. The Missouri Budget Project noted that Nixon has announced a state budget shortfall of $90 million for Fiscal Year 2012. That problem results in part from this giveaway:

The Office of Administration, Division of Budget & Planning estimates that phasing out the state’s corporate franchise tax, as approved by the Legislature this session, will reduce state revenue by $25 million in FY 2012 (increasing to a cost of $87 million annually when fully phased in).

Consider my cynical eyebrow raised.

But I digress. So consider my knuckles rapped. And let’s return to what Wucher told voters.

He said that the second problem with Paycheck Deception was that it required public employee union members, every year, to reauthorize the use of their dues for political purposes. What you do, if you’re a Republican legislator, is just keep chipping away at people’s rights: whether it has to do with unions, abortion, or voting. Set up barriers and institute bureaucratic red tape. Freedom my sweet patootie. They are not about freedom.

Paycheck Deception was Wisconsin again … only a little further south.

Wucher told me that as he talked to voters about Paycheck “Protection”, he offered, regardless of whether they agreed with him or not, to let them use his personal cellphone to call their state rep and comment on the bill.

All his work paid off. The bill failed.

In fact, all the Republican attacks on workers failed. Here are the most notable of them: Right-to-Work-for-Less failed. Paycheck “Protection” failed. Attempts to undo minimum wage protection failed. An attempt to expand charter schools and eliminate teacher tenure failed. Nixon vetoed a bill that would have reduced human rights in the workplace. The only dark spot occurred in the budget process because Republicans refused to replenish the workers’ compensation second injury fund.

Thanks to the Bryan Wuchers in the union movement, Missouri workers are safer than they would otherwise have been. And he can go back to Dierbergs–knowing that next spring, AFL-CIO workers will have to hit the pavement again.