On Saturday, my attention was split between two screens.
One was playing The Super Mario Bros. Movie for the hundredth time in my house, and my son, sick with a fever, kept wanting me to watch his favorite parts. And the other was the Virginia Senate livestream of the last day—sine die—of this year’s regular session I had playing on my laptop.
So as America’s favorite Italian plumber dodged Koopa Troopas and Goombas to save the Mushroom Kingdom, I watched as Republicans and Democrats debated the merits of public-sector collective bargaining.
The legislation passed, signaling a historic moment for Virginia, where it has been state policy since the 1940s to oppose public-sector collective bargaining, and where it’s been illegal since 1977.
Public employees in every corner of Virgina—teachers, firefighters, and public maintenance workers—are set to have the right to collectively bargain with their employers.
Additionally, 28,000 home care providers paid with Medicaid dollars were included in the bill. They were added back in after the Senate initially passed a version that had excluded them.
The exclusion of some higher education workers is what made passage of the bill bittersweet.
After the House version of the bill removed higher education workers, the version that ultimately passed included them, but only partly so.
Campus “service employees” like janitors, groundskeepers, and security guards are included in the bill, as are workers at the University of Virginia Medical Center and the Virginia Commonwealth University Health System Authority.
But anyone else that isn’t a “service employee” at a Virginia public university or college was excluded from the bill. That means that university faculty, librarians, and athletic coaches will not get collective bargaining rights under the bill.
The fate of this legislation, for now, rests with Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who has the option of making changes to the bill to include more workers or even exclude more. It’s possible she makes no changes at all before enacting it. It’s hard to imagine she would outright veto it.
Spanberger has until April 13 to act on the legislation.
As Mario would say, Lets-a go!
