New Orleans  Conservatives of all stripes and nationalities seem to have settled on a killer app for delivering a death blow to unions: block the dues collection mechanism!

Short memories will recall that earlier this year there were fierce legislative battles in Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas and elsewhere whose sole objective was to eliminate the ability of public employees to have their dues paid to unions or employee associations through payroll deductions from their checks. The legislation state by state was almost identical with small adjustments place to place only in severity and breadth. Some states exempted no public employees from state to municipal to schools. Others were more selective, like Texas, and tried to favor certain employee groups like police and fire. Most of the legislation was cranked out on the Koch brothers’ ALEC template. The objective was transparent: cripple unions.

Unions and their allies were both good and lucky in the 2015 legislative sessions and managed to block passage of most of these Wisconsin-wannabe measures. It’s not clear how long the streak can continue. The Texas Tribune reports that Texas Lieutenant-Governor Dan Patrick has already started loading up the big guns on this bill for the 2017 session, partially by making it an election primary issue for the committee chair that in his view botched the process preventing the bill from emerging for a vote in the recent session. Patrick is assigning the bill to committees in advance of the session so that it is stripped of any problems. Even the favored few public employee groups that escaped elimination last year seem likely to be on the chopping block in the coming bill. It’s a heckuva a way to build solidarity in the house of labor, although that may not be enough to save us.

The problem is that the Republicans hold the whip hand in Texas and many other southern and border states coming perilously close to the kind of daunting, no holds barred, no prisoners taken one-party rule that can be found in parliamentary government elsewhere. The recent victory of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom giving them majorities rather than a coalition government, has led them to propose amendments to the Trade Union Act that would eliminate all payroll dues deductions for any public employee group, hoping to decimate the membership of the largely public workers’ union, Unison, and other unions with public members that have long been the backbone of the Labour Party. There will be little that can stand in their way, and state by state we are facing a similar challenge in the United States now.

In Texas they are clear. This has little to do with the workers and whether they need or want union representation on the job. Proponents like the Lieutenant-Governor and his allies are clear this is all about making sure that unions have a depleted treasury and will be limited in the amount that they can donate politically to their opponents. It’s all about running the well dry. Workers and their unions are collateral, ideological damage standing in the way of naked political self-interest.

The clock is ticking for unions and even with Herculean efforts the damage will be extensive.