{"id":77,"date":"2026-05-25T09:38:54","date_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:38:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=77"},"modified":"2026-05-25T09:38:54","modified_gmt":"2026-05-25T09:38:54","slug":"how-gov-spanberger-betrayed-virginias-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/frontierhousingreport.com\/?p=77","title":{"rendered":"How Gov. Spanberger Betrayed Virginia\u2019s Workers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Exactly one year and six days ago, the Prospect<\/em> posted a piece I\u2019d just written about Colorado\u2019s Jared Polis, under the headline \u201cThe Democrats\u2019 One and Only Union-Busting Governor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Learn to Code, They Said<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019ve just formally censured him for complying with President Trump\u2019s demand to commute the sentence of Tina Peters, the county clerk who\u2019d been convicted for enabling a Trump acolyte to illegally access and copy the hard drives from her county\u2019s voting machines in an effort to prove that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

More from Harold Meyerson<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

But Polis no longer holds that \u201cone and only\u201d status when it comes to Democratic governors who bust unions. Two weeks ago, Virginia\u2019s Abigail Spanberger did just that by vetoing a bill that would have given Virginia\u2019s public-sector workers the right to bargain collectively.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s somewhat anomalous \u201cright-to-work\u201d status. (Colorado\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s \u201cright-to-work\u201d law, Virginia\u2019s ban dates from the 1940s\u2014but 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\u2019s vote on the bill to grant public employees the right to unionize and bargain also split, like Colorado\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n

Spanberger insists she\u2019s OK with collective bargaining in theory, just not in practice. To those ends, she sought to have the bill amended. Where the legislature\u2019s bill required<\/em> government agencies to bargain with their workers\u2019 union once a majority of workers had voted to certify that union as their representative, Spanberger\u2019s amendment merely permitted<\/em> government agencies to bargain if they so chose, and unlike the legislature\u2019s bill, her amendments also didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2014the day that Spanberger will be termed out of office.<\/p>\n

Read more Following the Money on Sean Duffy\u2019s Road Trip<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019t keep Spanberger\u2019s 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\u2014with enough votes to defeat her opponent by a robust 15 percentage points\u2014she won 1,976,857 votes, or just 28.5 percent of the total number of voting-age Virginians.)<\/p>\n

Virginia\u2019s Democratic legislators refused to include Spanberger\u2019s 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\u2019d campaigned for her just six months before\u2014not least because she promised first responders that she would support such a bill during the campaign.<\/p>\n

To be sure, Spanberger has signed other pro-worker legislation since she took office in January. That includes a raise in the state\u2019s 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<\/em>: 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 approval ratings at their highest level\u2014roughly 65 to 70 percent\u2014since the 1960s. Our corporate behemoths, as well as smaller business, remain fanatically opposed to unions, as do such corporate shills as Jeff Bezos\u2019s mouthpieces recently inflicted on the readers of The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s editorial pages\u2014who\u2019ve applauded Spanberger\u2019s opposition to worker power.<\/p>\n

Spanberger is perfectly free to curry the support of Bezos\u2019s 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\u2019s well to the right of Josh Hawley on the question of their rights as workers, should walk away\u2014make that, run away\u2014from her now.<\/p>\n

Read more Hawaii Just Found a Way to Keep Corporations Out of Politics<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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