City and county leaders across Virginia, from both parties, are right to panic about a bill the General Assembly has sent to the governor’s desk that would compel local governments to engage in collective bargaining.
If the bill is enacted, elected community leaders would lose significant autonomy to national unions and bureaucrats in Richmond. The inevitable result would be higher property taxes across the commonwealth.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) has until April 13 to decide whether to sign the bill into law. It’s shaping up as a significant test of her focus on affordability, her willingness to stand up to overreach from the left and her campaign promise not to repeal the right-to-work statute that has made Virginia an attractive place to do business.
Virginia used to prohibit collective bargaining for state and local employees. In 2021, Democrats changed the law to allow local governments to engage in collective bargaining. Fewer than 20 jurisdictions have chosen to do so, and it hasn’t gone well where it’s been tried.
That’s why unions made this bill their top priority during the legislative session. It requires collective bargaining for wages, benefits and working conditions for state and local government employees.
To issue new regulations and oversee bargaining, the bill establishes yet another state agency – a Public Employee Relations Board – with the power to rule against local governments in forced arbitration.
The legislation requires state and local employers to turn over to unions the personal contact information of their employees, including home addresses, cellphone numbers and emails, so that they can be pressured to become dues-paying members. The bill also requires state and local governments to let unions hold mandatory, closed-door meetings for all new hires – with taxpayers required to pay for the time.
Adding insult to injury, state legislators included language to block their own staffers from unionizing, so they wouldn’t need to deal with the hassles created by their law. And of course, the legislation doesn’t give local governments any extra money to fund the new commitments that will arise from the scheme.
The Virginia Association of Counties, a nonpartisan group, is pleading with Spanberger to veto the bill. The mayors of Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Hampton, Newport News and Suffolk wrote a joint letter in January expressing opposition.
Fairfax County, the state’s largest, offers a cautionary tale. The collective bargaining agreements it reached after the 2021 state law have contributed to surging personnel costs and massive budget shortfalls, which led supervisors to raise taxes.
The Center for American Progress, a liberal D.C. think tank, claims this power grab is about “overcoming the state’s Jim Crow past.” 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.
The president of the Virginia Association of Counties, Prince William County Supervisor Victor S. Angry (D), and four of the seven mayors who signed that letter opposing the bill, are Black.
Prince William County Schools is another local government entity that chose to engage in collective bargaining after the 2021 state law. But School Board Chairman-at-Large Babur Lateef, a Democrat who supports collective bargaining, opposes the state bill. “If your number one goal of being elected was to do something about affordability, this goes in the exact opposite direction, and you will be putting a burden on the Virginia taxpayer like we’ve never seen,” he said.
Federal government employees are not allowed to collectively bargain for wages or health or retirement benefits. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the signer of the National Labor Relations Act and a tireless champion of private-sector unions, didn’t think public employees should be able to collectively bargain at all. He thought that elected officials should control government employment.
Collective bargaining is supposed to be about giving workers the power to get a bigger chunk of their employer’s profits. Government doesn’t make profits, and the employer of government workers is ultimately the taxpayer. Throwing open the gates for these unions is an invitation for higher taxes and bloated bureaucracy, not a more affordable Virginia.
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