The bill to expand public-sector bargaining rights in Virginia has been attacked as taking away local control. But supporters say that’s not the case.
One of the main arguments to emerge against the public-sector collective bargaining bill passed by the Virginia General Assembly is that it will take away control from local governments when they are making important decisions about their budgets.
It’s an argument that Republicans made throughout this year’s legislative session in Richmond, it’s a fear being raised by local governments around Virginia, and last week, The Washington Post’s editorial board published a piece making the case that Gov. Abigail Spanberger should veto the bill “to stand up to overreach from the left.”
“If the bill is enacted, elected community leaders would lose significant autonomy to national unions and bureaucrats in Richmond,” the Post warned.
But supporters of the bill say such arguments are at best misplaced and at worst being made in bad faith as the deadline of April 13 for Spanberger to act on the bill draws closer.
“The only thing the bill really requires local governments to do is to have conversations with representatives of large groups of their employees (if they) choose to organize,” Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell said. “The employees have to have an election and agree to organize before the local government has to talk to anybody.”
If signed into law by Spanberger, the measure would give collective bargaining rights to hundreds of thousands of public workers in Virginia, including home care workers and some university workers—other campus workers are fighting to be included in the final version of the bill.
Surovell, who carried the bill in the Senate, said in an interview that contrary to what opponents of the bill claim, there are several provisions of the bill that actually significantly undermine a union’s leverage in the collective bargaining process.
One of them is that collective bargaining agreements are still subject to approval by the local entities that control the budgets that would fund the agreements. That’s true for contracts negotiated with no issues and for decisions made by an arbitrator when the two sides reach an impasse.
Another provision prohibits strikes and bans workers from public employment in Virginia for a year if they engage in them. Workers wouldn’t be able to negotiate over retirement benefits and most of them wouldn’t be able to negotiate over health benefits, Surovell said.
Toby Latham, a labor lawyer in Fairfax with Vasseghi Law Group, noted the bill would require decisions made by arbitrators to take into account the impact to taxpayers and the financial ability of the local government to cover the collective bargaining agreement.
“It’s misleading to say that the control is going to shift to the state,” Latham said in an interview. “Local governments are going to be able to bargain their contracts.”
It’s also relatively rare for contract negotiations to require arbitration.
The Virginia Education Association says that of its nine local unions that have won collective bargaining agreements over the last four years, there have only been two instances of them going into arbitration over a bargaining impasse.
Moriah Allen, a staff attorney with the VEA, said the bill isn’t about local or state control, rather it’s aimed at establishing the rights of public-sector workers.
“What we’re talking about is not permission that the state is giving its local government governing bodies,” Allen said in an interview. “We’re talking about rights that the state is giving its public sector workers.”
The Washington Post’s editorial board also claimed Virginia’s longstanding antipathy to public-sector collective bargaining wasn’t actually related to Jim Crow.
“The Center for American Progress, a liberal D.C. think tank, claims this power grab is about ‘overcoming the state’s Jim Crow past,’” the Post’s editorial board wrote. “In truth, the ban on public-sector bargaining was the result of a 1977 decision by the state supreme court. That was 13 years after the Civil Rights Act.”
But it was the struggle of Black University of Virginia hospital workers against workplace segregation and for better pay in the 1940s that resulted in a 1948 state proclamation that made the ban on public sector bargaining “official state policy.”
Then, the 1977 Virginia Supreme Court ruling, which cited the General Assembly’s historical view of the issue, made public sector bargaining illegal. In 1993, lawmakers passed a state law banning public sector bargaining.
SEIU Virginia 512 president LaNoral Thomas pushed back on the Post’s suggestion, saying Virginia’s ban on public-sector collective bargaining is “absolutely rooted” in Jim Crow.
“It’s no surprise that people will try to change the narrative, especially in this moment in the country because no one wants us to talk about the history of how we got here,” Thomas said in an interview. “And it’s like, ‘No, we’re not going to allow y’all to erase history.’ This is what happened. And we’re not going to act like we don’t know what happened.”
