Wisconsin’s Republican legislators have put off a vote on a bill that would undermine good, middle-class jobs and take collective bargaining rights away from some 200,000 public employees, according to JSOnline and other news reports.

Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant faith leaders from Illinois and Wisconsin today offered sanctuary to the 14 Democratic members of the Wisconsin state Senate who left the chamber Wednesday to prevent Gov. Scott Walker (R) from railroading through his budget measure that would destroy middle-class jobs and eliminate collective bargaining rights for public service workers.

We are rolling out actions today for people to show support for embattled state and local workers. We’ll have more in coming days. Please join in and pass these along.

While the assault on workers in Wisconsin is drawing national attention, the state level coordinated attacks on middle-class jobs and workers’ rights roll on across the country. (Visit our new States of Denial website here for more information.)

Comedian Lee Camp, a friend of working families, urges all of us to join in solidarity with workers in Wisconsin and FOCUS on what’s happening in Wisconsin because:

right when we get involved with something that matters, something that could truly make a difference if enough of us came together as one, we’re told to veer over here, look over there, stop looking at the wrongs being perpretated around the world and instead focus on guitar hero or “Jersey Shore.”

Ohio AFL-CIO President Tim Burga will be on the Union Edge radio program today to discuss the assault on the state’s middle class by Republican Gov. John Kasich and Republicans in the state legislature.

Listen here between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET.

UAW President Bob King says he and the union’s members fully support Wisconsin workers’ “courageous efforts”:

to fight back against this thinly veiled, purely partisan effort to destroy unions in favor of a system [Gov. Scott]Walker and his well-heeled political pals will control.

Wisconsin state Senate Minority Leader Mark Miller (D) says he and his colleagues who left the state Capitol yesterday—delaying a vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) budget bill that would take away bargaining rights from county and local employees as well as state workers—took the action “to allow time for the involved parties to work together to balance the budget.”

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is scheduled to speak at noon CST to the expected 20,000-plus as the weeklong protest in Madison against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attack on middle-class jobs and state workers continues.

Our Eddie Vale will be tweeting the speech, so follow on twitter here or check back with us for coverage.

Hats off to economist Dean Baker for putting into perspective Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) attempts to decimate family-supporting wages and benefits and take away state employees’ freedom to bargain. Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, writes today:

You have to give Gov. Walker and his wealthy patrons credit. Here we have a situation where Wall Street fat cats wrecked the economy—people like Richard Fuld, Robert Rubin, and Angelo Mozilo—and they’ve  somehow managed to blame schoolteachers and the highway patrol.