WASHINGTON — It’s a Thursday in a downtown office building. Five staffers are fielding phone calls, blogging and brainstorming. White boards are scribbled on, erased and scribbled on some more. Dating lives are on hold. No summer vacations are planned.

In other words, little has changed since these staffers were with the Howard Dean, Wesley Clark and John F. Kerry presidential campaigns. But this time, they’re trying to win one for Wal-Mart workers.

Their group, Wake-Up Wal-Mart, is the latest manifestation of the ongoing campaign to change the nation’s largest private employer. After years of failed attempts to help Wal-Mart workers organize a union, leaders of the United Food and Commercial Workers are trying an Internet-oriented approach developed in recent failed presidential campaigns.

When Joseph Hansen became president last year, he switched from approaching employees inside the stores to putting on a wider campaign designed to win over the company’s customers and general public. His hope is that public reaction and negative publicity will force change in some practices.

In January, the UFCW hired Paul Blank, 29, former political director of the Howard Dean presidential campaign. Blank pulled together Wake-Up Wal-Mart, a team of young former Democratic presidential campaigns staffers, for a grass-roots effort to draw in consumers.

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"For a number of years, we were going by the rules," attempting to sign up workers under rights granted by the National Labor Relations Act, said William McDonough, head of UFCW’s organizing department. "We got very frustrated."

The mega-retailer’s public image had already taken some hits before the campaign began, in part because of organized labor’s earlier attempts to draw attention to what it argues is the downside of Wal-Mart’s dominance. Wal-Mart is facing the largest ever class-action lawsuit charging gender discrimination. Critics say it doesn’t pay a fair wage and creates a burden for localities because it fails to provide adequate health care for workers. Wal-Mart has agreed to pay $11 million to settle a federal investigation that found hundreds of illegal immigrants were hired to clean its stores.

McDonough said two well-known, failed organizing attempts showed that unions had to change tactics: Wal-Mart eliminated meatpacking positions nationwide and began to sell prepackaged meat after meatpackers at a store in Texas voted to organize in 2000. The company said it had intended to do so before the workers voted for a union.

"That had a chilling impact on any other organizing," McDonough said.

Also, Wal-Mart in April closed a Jonquiere, Quebec, store where workers had voted in a union, saying the store was underperforming.

"It’s a very small group dealing with very big things," Blank said of Wake-Up Wal-Mart.

The group has two other former Dean staffers: political director Buffy Wicks, 27, and Jeremy Bird, 26, whose mother once worked for Wal-Mart. Brendan Bush, 25, who runs the group’s blog, worked for the Kerry campaign. Communications adviser Chris Kofinis, 35, helped originate the DraftWesleyClark.com campaign and was a strategist for TheNaderFactor.com, a Democratic group that worked to pull Nader voters to other candidates.

Wake-Up Wal-Mart’s first major action was to garner opposition to Wal-Mart for Mother’s Day in a campaign called "Love Mom, Not Wal-Mart," in which shoppers signed a petition promising not to buy a Mother’s Day gift at the store. About 22,000 people signed the online promise in the 1 1/2 weeks before Mother’s Day.

Visitors to the organization’s Web site can enter their Zip codes to find the closest Wal-Mart and then promise, online, to take responsibility for focusing attention on that particular store: gathering signatures for petitions criticizing Wal-Mart or standing near stores to tell people about Wal-Mart practices they dislike.

The UFCW’s membership includes employees at grocery stores, which face stiff competition from Wal-Mart stores, known as Supercenters, that also sell groceries.

Wal-Mart has no plans to deal with Wake-Up Wal-Mart. "We do not plan to talk with them," spokeswoman Mona Williams said in an e-mail. "Some of our critics are open-minded people who are genuinely concerned about issues and want to make the world a better place. We reach out to them and try to work toward common goals. Other groups simply pull publicity stunts to further their own narrow self-interests — and Wake-Up Wal-Mart is clearly in that category."

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The UFCW isn’t the only union pursuing a different strategy. The Service Employees International Union backed a group formed earlier this year called Wal-Mart Watch. Much like Wake-Up Wal-Mart, it is trying to build alliances with other groups that disagree with Wal-Mart policies.

Some labor experts think the UFCW’s different effort is long overdue. "It surprised me that it took so long for UFCW to realize it doesn’t work on a store-by-store effort," said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

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Recently, Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr., R, vetoed a bill that would have effectively required Wal-Mart to pay more for health benefits in Maryland, and voters in a Los Angeles suburb rejected an initiative to open a Supercenter there.

Though Wal-Mart Chief Executive H. Lee Scott Jr. "has said he will not raise wages, if you get more stuff like the vetoed Maryland law and in Los Angeles, I think that they will begin to make some accommodations in both wages and health care," said Nelson Lichtenstein, editor of the upcoming book "Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?" and director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Some say they see the beginnings of that already: Wal-Mart is launching a massive counteroffensive to protect its image, spending millions of dollars on advertisements in which employees praise the company as a great place to work. And for the first time, Wal-Mart invited 100 journalists to its Arkansas headquarters last spring.