How Gov. Spanberger Betrayed Virginia’s Workers – The American Prospect

Exactly one year and six days ago, the Prospect posted a piece I’d just written about Colorado’s Jared Polis, under the headline “The Democrats’ One and Only Union-Busting Governor.”

As of a couple weeks ago, that headline is no longer accurate. Polis is still a union-buster and even more out of sync with Colorado Democrats, who’ve just formally censured him for complying with President Trump’s demand to commute the sentence of Tina Peters, the county clerk who’d been convicted for enabling a Trump acolyte to illegally access and copy the hard drives from her county’s voting machines in an effort to prove that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.

More from Harold Meyerson

But Polis no longer holds that “one and only” status when it comes to Democratic governors who bust unions. Two weeks ago, Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger did just that by vetoing a bill that would have given Virginia’s public-sector workers the right to bargain collectively.

The parallels with Polis are almost uncanny. In Colorado, every Democrat in each house of the legislature had voted for a bill that would have ended the state’s somewhat anomalous “right-to-work” status. (Colorado’s law, dating from 1943, says that once a union wins majority support in a recognition election, it then has to win 75 percent support in a second election to be permitted to collect dues from members.) Every Republican voted against. Siding with the Republicans, Polis vetoed the bill.

In Virginia, state employees have no right to bargain collectively, while municipal employees have had that right since 2021, but only in cities that grant them those rights (which number roughly a dozen). Like Colorado’s “right-to-work” law, Virginia’s ban dates from the 1940s—but unlike Colorado, at that point Virginia was still under the thumb of Jim Crow white supremacist rule. The ban was explicitly racist, motivated by the prospect of a racially integrated union at one public hospital. This spring’s vote on the bill to grant public employees the right to unionize and bargain also split, like Colorado’s, exactly on party lines, with 61 House Democrats voting yes and 35 Republicans voting no, with no crossovers, while in the Senate, the tally was 20 Democrats voting yes and 18 Republicans voting no, again with no crossovers. And like Polis, Spanberger sided with the Republicans and vetoed the bill.

Spanberger insists she’s OK with collective bargaining in theory, just not in practice. To those ends, she sought to have the bill amended. Where the legislature’s bill required government agencies to bargain with their workers’ union once a majority of workers had voted to certify that union as their representative, Spanberger’s amendment merely permitted government agencies to bargain if they so chose, and unlike the legislature’s bill, her amendments also didn’t require even those government agencies that opted to grant workers bargaining rights to bargain over wages and working conditions. Her amendments also specifically denied bargaining rights to workers at the state’s Port Authority and its universities (faculty, staff, teaching and research assistants, as well as university hospital staff) and delayed applying the law to local governments until January 1, 2030—the day that Spanberger will be termed out of office.

In addition to the amendments she formally proposed, sources tell me that she also floated another one that would have required unions to win a majority of the votes of all the workers in the agency they sought to unionize, not just a majority of those who voted. That this is the substance of a new Florida law enacted at the insistence of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis apparently didn’t keep Spanberger’s people from testing this out with some Democratic legislators, who instantly shot it down. Nor were her people embarrassed by the fact that, like almost all American elected officials, Spanberger had won office with the backing of nowhere near a majority of all voting-age constituents. (The population of voting-age Virginians is roughly 6,930,000; when Spanberger was elected last November—with enough votes to defeat her opponent by a robust 15 percentage points—she won 1,976,857 votes, or just 28.5 percent of the total number of voting-age Virginians.)

Virginia’s Democratic legislators refused to include Spanberger’s amendments in the bill, since they clearly understood those amendments would effectively negate just about everything their bill would do. On May 14, Spanberger vetoed the bill, stunning not just the legislators but the union members who’d campaigned for her just six months before—not least because she promised first responders that she would support such a bill during the campaign.

To be sure, Spanberger has signed other pro-worker legislation since she took office in January. That includes a raise in the state’s minimum wage and the establishment of paid family leave. What apparently crosses the line for her, as it does for Polis, who also governs a state that boasts a number of worker benefits, is worker power: the ability of workers to advocate for themselves without fear of being penalized for it, much less being found in violation of the law for doing so.

Exactly who Spanberger is trying to ingratiate herself with by her veto is somewhat mysterious. A 2020 poll of Virginia voters found that they favored granting collective-bargaining rights to public employes by a 68 percent to 25 percent margin. A number of recent nationwide polls have found unions’ approval ratings at their highest level—roughly 65 to 70 percent—since the 1960s. Our corporate behemoths, as well as smaller business, remain fanatically opposed to unions, as do such corporate shills as Jeff Bezos’s mouthpieces recently inflicted on the readers of The Washington Post’s editorial pages—who’ve applauded Spanberger’s opposition to worker power.

Spanberger is perfectly free to curry the support of Bezos’s sock puppets, of course. But at a time when virtually every Democratic official insists that the party focus on rebuilding its ties to the working class, the kind of opposition to worker power that Polis and now Spanberger have demonstrated should completely disqualify them both from any higher office, at least on the Democratic ticket. Democrats who walked precincts for Spanberger last year, only to discover that she’s well to the right of Josh Hawley on the question of their rights as workers, should walk away—make that, run away—from her now.