‘Shameful’: Spanberger signals upcoming veto for collective bargaining legislation

Gov. Abigail Spanberger is caving to the MAGAs again, this time over legislation that would expand collective bargaining rights for public employees – including teachers, firefighters, home care workers, state workers, county workers, city workers, higher ed workers.

Word from Scott Surovell, the State Senate Majority Leader, is that Spanberger has signaled she will veto measures that passed the House of Delegates with more than 60 yes votes and passed the State Senate with slimmer majorities earlier this year.

Not that majority votes matter in Virginia much these days.

The legislation would create a Public Employee Relations Board to oversee government unions and to certify elections within bargaining units.

Current law gives localities the right to block efforts from their public-sector employees to form unions.

Which is why the take-home pay for public-sector employees sucks.

Spanberger’s first response to the collective bargaining legislation was to send the House and 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.

“Shame,” was how the Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition, which collectively represents hundreds of thousands of workers across the Commonwealth, began its joint statement on the planned vetoes from the supposed Democrat governor.

Pretty much sums up where we are, but the statement did go further.

“Abigail Spanberger today betrayed half a million of Virginia’s public service workers by going back on her campaign promise to support collective bargaining rights for the people who keep our Commonwealth and communities running every day,” the coalition said.

“Instead of aligning herself with General Assembly Democrats who unanimously supported this bill, Spanberger instead vetoed the bill, just as her predecessor Glenn Youngkin did, sending Virginia workers the crystal-clear message that they are no better off than they were under a Republican governor. Many workers were excited by her promise to finally give them a voice on the job, and are now left questioning why she has left them behind.”

It’s a fair question, in the wake of Spanberger, on Monday, signing a gutted version of paid family and medical leave bills that had passed the General Assembly earlier in the year.

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ICYMI

• Spanberger signs watered-down paid family and medical leave bills

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A lot of folks put a lot of time and effort into getting Spanberger elected, only for her tenure to turn out to be the second term of the Youngkin administration.

“It is Orwellian for the governor to suggest that she supports collective bargaining rights while introducing a version of the bill that delayed extending those rights to local workers until the next decade, inserted a killswitch into the bill that would have effectively allowed a future governor to end collective bargaining without a single vote from the General Assembly, and took workers’ rights in Virginia backwards by weakening existing collective bargaining agreements and reducing worker protections across the Commonwealth,” the Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition said in its statement.

“To then hide behind local politicians who are scared to sit down with their own workers, instead of acknowledging the many local elected officials who called on her to sign the bill and the half a million public service workers whose lives could have been made better by this bill, is cowardly. The governor thinks she knows what is best for workers, and that is precisely the problem. She is not listening to workers.”