by Steve Haner

Legislation to expand the potential for union contracts to cover most local and state employees is on the verge of approval if Democrats in the House of Delegates and Senate can reconcile two versions of the bill. 

They might also have to reconcile with locally elected Democratic officials. Many of them have openly opposed the plan to remove the authority they were granted in 2020 to decide whether their employees could bargain collectively, an option many localities have not taken.

Local officials also note that that state is leaving with them the burden of paying for the higher salaries and benefit costs which are likely to result. The only additional state dollars being included in the pending budget cover creation of a new Public Employee Relations Board to manage the new bargaining process.

On the long list of transformative 2026 legislation heading for the desk of new Governor Abigail Spanberger (D), this might have the deepest impact on the state’s political future. Public employee unions are the backbone of her party in the cities and states where they can organize.

For the first time under these bills, state employees will also be allowed to organize and negotiate a contract. The House bill leaves out employees of the state’s higher education institutions, and the Senate bill exempts home care workers. Both delay implementation until 2028, a planning period the Virginia Education Association complains about on its webpage advocating for these bills. 

“Just as important: these bills aren’t only about bargaining,” the VEA writes. “They also protect collective action, meaning your right to act together to improve your working conditions. That includes things like signing a group letter to your school board, speaking together at a public meeting, organizing around workload, staffing, or safety concerns. We’ve seen situations where workers faced retaliation for acting together.” 

The Department of Planning and Budget predicts a state administrative cost of about $45 million on the Senate’s introduced bill, which did not include home health care workers. On the House version which does allow unionization of that workforce, the projected fiscal impact is $60 million, with 376 employees needed just to manage the process, the largest number of them with the Department of Medical Assistance Services.

Judicial branch employees and employees working for the General Assembly are exempt. But Planning and Budget foresees there could be as many as 17 distinct bargaining units within state government, on top of all the possible individual unions and contacts with the state’s cities, counties and towns. A proposed tweak included in the bill to the current law against public employee strikes seems to weaken it.

The Chesterfield County of Supervisors, three Democrats and two Republicans, signed a joint column arguing against this idea appearing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch this week. 

“We strongly support preserving current law that grants local governments the option to determine if and how to engage in collective bargaining with public sector employees. To be clear, localities already have this authority… Each community is best positioned to evaluate its own fiscal capacity, service delivery needs, and workforce priorities,” they wrote.

The president of the Virginia Association of Counties, Supervisor Victor Angry of Prince William County, had his views published by the online outlet Cardinal News. He praised the 2020 law leaving the decision with local authorities and asked that it remain in place.

“That (local option) framework was intentional. It recognized that Virginia is a commonwealth of diverse communities, rural, suburban and urban, with different fiscal capacities, workforce structures and service delivery needs. It respected the principle that decisions affecting local budgets and local employees should be made by those closest to both,” he wrote.

While his county adopted a “locally tailored ordinance” to allow contract negotiations, “other counties have taken different approaches based on their own workforce composition, fiscal capacity and service priorities. That is not inconsistency; that is responsive governance.”

The Democratic chairman of Prince William County’s school board told a local television reporter that the bill would be “the single largest single tax increase in Virginia’s history” because no additional state funds would accompany it.

The local option approach in the 2020 law may have been intentional, but it was also a compromise, an indication of how far the union movement could get with the narrow Democratic legislative control at the time. Somebody at the time surely invoked the oft-used image of the camel’s nose sneaking into a tent. Two statewide elections later, the whole camel is under the canvas.