New Orleans   The assault on unions is getting very personal. The legislative and legal attacks are part of the environment of constant struggle between unions and companies of course. People try to talk about America as a classless society, but when it comes to the labor-management tussle at work and in community, the class struggle is still part of the everyday experience.

Recently this has been politicized more crisply, especially after Citizens’ United and the surge of money into politics, when mega-rich, hyper-conservative gazillionaires realized that unions were one of the few institutions on the other side of the political divide that had the base and motivation to cobble together the dollars to meet them partway. What started with hate then morphed into strategy, and from there the tactical targets were clarified.

The right realized that the deep labor union pockets were still in the public sector since the industrial and private sector membership was falling like a rock towards 5% membership, if not below. If public sector unions and their membership could be eroded, then there was an almost open field for the right. So we’ve had Harris v. Quinn that broke union shop for homecare workers starting in Illinois. We’ve had near misses for union shop for school teachers with Justice Antonio Scalia’s death allowing us to dodge the bullet. And, thanks to the Koch brothers and their allies with ALEC, we’ve seen one statehouse and legislative chamber after another go right with new right-to-work campaigns and successes even in states like Michigan, an evisceration of public employee unions in Wisconsin, withdrawal of recognitions for lower wage workers in homecare in Michigan and Ohio, and more.

Now, they are engaging in hand-to-hand combat with teams of canvassers going door-to-door to attempt to convince union members to drop their membership and leave their unions. The Wall Street Journal reported on this new alarming anti-union tactic. A group called Freedom Foundation has raised a budget of more than $3 million in 2015 to employ hundreds of outreach people to work the list of union members in Oregon and Washington, available through public information, and do home visits with the sole purpose of getting home health and home childcare workers to withdraw from their union, which is the Service Employees International Union in this instance.

Tom McCabe who heads the Freedom Foundation claims that they have “knocked on the doors of about 15,000 home health-care and child-care workers out of about 50,000 overall in Washington state since July 2014.” He also claims he is targeting about 35,000 workers in Oregon. He also claims “the number of unionized child-care workers has fallen by 60% since he started the effort.” If true, they might have done 4000 or so home visits and convinced a couple of thousand workers to drop their membership at a cost of about $1500 per drop. That might make his program too pricey even for the mega-rich. Putting even more cold water on his claims, the head of the union in Washington, David Rolf, was quoted as saying that McCabe, “talks a big game, but they just aren’t having the impact they claim to be having.”

I’m sure Rolf is right, but that doesn’t mean this is any less painful for the union. This is about money. This kind of door-to-door, hand-to-hand combat means that a good part of the money the union might have spent on “offense,” in expanding rights, wages, and benefits for its members or new organizing, is now having to be spent on “defense,” to put organizers and others in the field to offset withdrawals and increase membership percentages. The objective of the conservative forces is to reduce labor’s expenditures on politics, and a field program like this has to be met in full and in force, allowing conservatives to win at either heads or tails if they reduce the level of contributions unions can make to advance their members’ interests.

The article in the Journal was obviously sales-and-promotion for McCabe and his so-called Freedom Foundation. He says he wants to take this door-to-door attack to California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. We better hope he doesn’t succeed, but in the meantime, his advertisement, needs to also be our call to action.