The 365,000-member International Association of Fire Fighters voted on Wednesday to censure Gov. Abigail Spanberger over her vetoes of collective bargaining legislation.
Spanberger, of course, can’t run for re-election as governor – Virginia law doesn’t allow it – but governors often do have aspirations for higher office down the road, like, oh, let’s just throw out there, as an example, the U.S. Senate.
For that matter: president, vice president.
The IAAF censure spells out that the union – again, 365,000 members – will “formally oppose Governor Spanberger in any future federal or national political endeavors, including but not limited to campaigns for United States Senate, federal appointments, or any national party leadership position, unless and until she takes meaningful legislative action to enable collective bargaining rights for Virginia’s professional firefighters and emergency medical workers.”
Stick a fork in her political career, right?
Democrats, in particular, aren’t long for the politics game when they have 365,000 union members saying, You’re done.
The legislation that she scuttled would have created a Public Employee Relations Board to oversee local government unions and to certify elections within bargaining units.
Current state law gives localities the right to block efforts from their public-sector employees to form unions.
ICYMI: Spanberger on collective bargaining
- ‘Shameful’: Spanberger signals upcoming veto for collective bargaining legislation
- Spanberger vetoes collective bargaining: Who does she think she’s fooling?
- Spanberger doesn’t understand why labor critics see ‘betrayal’ on collective bargaining
Spanberger’s first response to the collective bargaining legislation was to send the House of Delegates and State Senate bills back to the General Assembly with a provision delaying the right of employees to unionize until 2030 – that is, after the completion of her single term as governor.
Brave stand there.
Legislators sent the bills back to her in their original form; her second response was the use of the veto pen.
“Abigail Spanberger turned her back on the very workers who helped put her in the governor’s mansion. But firefighters have long memories. Today’s unanimous censure vote sends a clear message to all elected officials: when you make a promise to fire fighters, we expect you to keep it. It doesn’t matter what party you’re from – if you break your commitments, the IAFF will hold you accountable,” IAAF President Edward A. Kelly said in a statement.
What’s particularly galling to the IAAF is that Spanberger campaigned on her support for the extensions of collective bargaining rights for government workers.
Highlighting this stand, her campaign put out a statement from Spanberger ahead of Labor Day last fall blasting the Trump administration for a presidential executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from federal workers.
I’m proud to stand alongside Virginians in speaking out against this reckless executive order, which risks politicizing some of our country’s most consequential public service roles. Stripping federal workers of their right to negotiate for fair treatment and join a union does nothing to make our Commonwealth or our country safer.
Amid the furor over the vetoes, Spanberger told MS NOW anchor Jonathan Capehart at the 2026 Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference, with a straight face: “I continue to support public-sector collective bargaining,” then explained why she did what she did to kill the bills that would have allowed public-sector collective bargaining.
“Standing up an entirely new system, as the chief executive who would be implementing it, is a big and substantial shift, and so one of the things that I proposed in the amendment is, as we are creating, we call it the Perry Bacon in Virginia, our Public Employee Relations Board, that state employees, who are currently the class of employees within the Commonwealth of Virginia that have absolutely no right to collectively bargain – at the local level, that right exists, it’s an opt-in by localities, where state employees, the ones I’m most responsible for, would go first.
“So, any hurdles, challenges, kind of getting any of the kind of practice and reps in for the PERB would be tested on the employees that I oversee.”
The way I understood her explanation, she wanted time to see how localities handled collective bargaining before committing the state to the bargaining process.
“By the point in time when our localities across the Commonwealth of Virginia would be implementing an entirely new system, we would have gotten through some of the hurdles. Eighteen months later was the delay,” was how she phrased it.
Capehart didn’t give Spanberger the opportunity to address “eighteen months later” being after her single term as governor would have come to an end, which would put it on her successor to either implement or, in the case of the pendulum swinging back to us having a Republican governor, putting the kibosh on the whole thing.
“Gov. Spanberger was a champion for firefighters during her time in the United State House of Representatives. But despite her promises on the campaign trail, and the efforts of the General Assembly in 2026, she vetoed legislation desperately needed by our members,” said Kurt Detrick, president of Virginia Professional Fire Fighters, the 11,000-member state chapter of the IAFF.
“Our communities hold their firefighters and emergency workers with the utmost trust and respect. We believe our elected officials should strive to maintain those same values,” said Detrick, who went on to say that VPFF “want(s) nothing more than to work with the governor to enact this critically important legislation and support our Commonwealth’s public safety professionals.”
“We are willing to sit down with her and discuss the path forward just as we have with members of her party. And if that happens, and legislation is approved as she promised, we will be pleased to retract this censure resolution and publicly communicate her efforts,” Detrick said.
That was the olive branch.
Andrew Pantelis, a 30-year veteran of the Prince George’s County (Maryland) Fire & EMS Department, and the vice president of the Fourth District of the IAFF, which represents more than 30,000 firefighters in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia and DC, brought down the hammer.
“In my decades of political experience supporting candidates and elected officials from both sides of the aisle, never have I experienced a betrayal such as this. Virginia’s workers, and specifically Virginia’s firefighters, deserve better,” Pantelis said.
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Chris Graham
