How Gov. Spanberger Betrayed Virginia's Workers by Harold Meyerson

[justaprogressive]

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.

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.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/25/how-gov-spanberger-betrayed-virginias-workers/

[underpants]

1. Damn Abbie.

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.)

[BlueTsunami2018]

2. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about.

She’s serving the ruling class by doing this. If you’re serving them you cannot simultaneously serve the working class and this is why a large portion of the working class feel like Democrats have abandoned them. And if both parties are going to allow those vultures to pick their pockets anyway, they’ll go with the genuine article over the half asser every time.

We talk “big tent” but there shouldn’t be any room in the tent for union busters. There’s a lot of people in this tent who shouldn’t be there. Democrats need to be more discerning. This should be a 100% working class party openly opposing oligarchs and owners. That’s an actual opposition to a party that only serves the rulers unequivocally and openly. You can’t play both sides of the fence.

Sick of this bullshit.

[senseandsensibility]

3. Depressing

but thanks for shedding light on this. I hope she is getting a strong reaction from labor in her state.

[justaprogressive]

5. me too.

[SunImp]

4. And some people want to deny that there are things wrong with our party

& brush things like this to the side to complain about "populists", progressives, young people, or whatever etc.
Constantly watching people like Bill Maher broke their brains