Still making weekend plans? Check out these Juneteenth events happening across Virginia and Dogwood’s weekly action guide. We also published a list of free concerts taking place this summer in Virginia.

I need to correct something from my previous newsletter: The Mid-Atlantic Pipe Trades Association has thousands of members working in data centers across Virginia, not hundreds as I had said.

I regret the error and appreciate the reader who wrote to let me know about it.

Below, I take a look at a pro-labor policy included in the cannabis compromise reached this week.

And, I share a consideration of race and patriotism.

Want to get in touch, or have stories you want me to cover? Reply to this email or reach out to me directly at michaeloconnor@couriernewsroom.com.

Michael O’Connor

Reporter, Dogwood

A newly-transplanted cannabis cuttings grow in pots at a medical marijuana cultivation facility in Massachusetts in 2018. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

By now, you probably know that Virginia is on track to establish a legal retail cannabis market.

But you might not know that tucked into that proposal is a victory for Virginia’s labor movement.

I’m talking about a requirement that cannabis businesses remain neutral when their workers want to form a union. It’s known as a labor peace agreement. These agreements also require unions to agree not to call a strike, picket, or boycott cannabis businesses they have them with.

Labor peace agreements are especially important in the cannabis industry, which includes cultivation facilities where workers are managing the growth of marijuana plants. These workers are typically considered agricultural workers, and federal labor law explicitly excludes agricultural workers from its protections.

But if Virginia’s retail cannabis market gets off the ground with the passing of the state budget, then cannabis agricultural workers would have a path to unionization and winning stronger contracts.

Also: There is a petition to get Spanberger to keep Virginia’s marijuana public consumption fee at $25. The budget plan would raise it to $250 on July 1, 2027, which advocates like Chelsea Higgs Wise worry will lead to racial disparities in how it gets enforced.

Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the lead state budget negotiators have an “agreement in principle,” but work remains on the biggest sticking point: how to tax data centers.

Chris Townsend has a piece in the Payday Report with his take on how Virginia’s labor movement got Spanberger wrong.

Alex Shultz has a post on Substack about the WNBA’s recent collective bargaining agreement.

Spanberger speaks at a May bill signing ceremony in Richmond. (Michael O’Connor/Dogwood)

State budget negotiations continue as Virginia approaches its July 1 deadline.

The biggest sticking point as of this writing remains how the state should tax data centers. State Sen. Louise Lucas (D-Portsmouth) has backed off her insistence that Virginia end its big tax break for data centers, but she wants to make them pay by establishing a new fee of some kind.

Lucas posted on X this afternoon that a budget deal would get done either by today or tomorrow.

“There will not be a shutdown!” she posted. “We will get to a reasonable compromise and we will have a budget on time.”

Yesterday, Spanberger used a bill signing ceremony in Loudoun to defend her position on data centers.

Spanberger cited bills she has already signed into law that help localities assess data center impacts, require stricter emissions standards for backup generators, and protect residents from bearing the infrastructure costs of large energy users.

“My administration has proposed several options to the State Senate throughout budget negotiations, including three variations on a first in the nation energy consumption fee for data centers, detailed in their impact and clear in their environmental goals,” Spanberger said.

That wasn’t enough for the protesters who confronted Spanberger after the event.

They urged her to end the data center tax break and use the money to help Virginians struggling to afford healthcare and buy groceries.

Beinecke Library at Yale/YouTube

Juneteenth, not to mention the ongoing celebrations over America’s 250th anniversary, asks us to consider what it means to take pride in a country still grappling with the horrible legacy of slavery.

Arthur Krsytal has a great piece in The New Yorker that explores what it means to feel patriotism in the Trump era.

Krystal shares how Black Americans like Frederick Douglas, Langston Hughes, and Muhammad Ali described what it meant to live in a country that persecuted them.

“In Southern states—and in border states such as Maryland, Missouri, and Delaware—Jim Crow prevailed; lynchings were common in the Deep South, and punishment for them was rare,” Krystal writes. “It seems likely that many enlisted in the hope that service might advance their prospects and those of their race, and their ambivalence about the nation runs through Black literature.”

Krystal mentions a poem by Claude McKay called “America,” which you can listen to above.

It begins:

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,

And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,

Stealing my breath of life, I will confess

I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.

Krystal concludes by arguing against the language of “patriotism.” Instead, he encourages us to be grateful for the promise of a country that struggles and often fails to live up to its highest ideals.

“Not everyone has to see America the same way, but amnesia about its history makes us easy prey for people who trade in ignorance,” Krystal writes.