Over the weekend, I stopped by Ornery Beer Company’s Fairfax location, where campus workers and unions held a town hall in support of public sector bargaining.
As a reminder, Virginia lawmakers want to expand collective bargaining rights to public sector workers, but are weighing whether to exclude higher education workers and Medicaid-funded home care workers.
The town hall held on Saturday was meant to rally support for including both categories of workers in what will be a significant expansion of workers’ rights in Virginia.
And it would come on the heels of what I’m told is an egregious example of campus administrators trampling on the rights of their employees.
Last December, Virginia State University abruptly fired six of its faculty members from the same department. The university isn’t commenting and has not explained why it did so.
According to an account by the union, the American Association of University Professors, and based on an interview I did with one of the professors, the six professors were given no written explanation for their terminations, no advance notice, and no opportunity to make the case to defend themselves.
The professors were told to sign a severance agreement on the spot or risk losing out on their severance. But all six refused and were then escorted off campus by university police and issued trespass warnings.
The professor I spoke with, Dr. Vitalis Temu, had worked at VSU for over 14 years. He told me he just wants his job back.
“It was so shocking,” he said.
You can find the petition to support him and his colleagues here.
