Today offered up some mixed results for the labor movement in Virginia.
On the one hand, different bills to lift the ban on collective bargaining for state employees and lift the partial ban on it for local employees passed in the Virginia Senate and the House of Delegates.
This makes it increasingly likely that thousands of workers around the state will get to clock into more democratic workplaces. But on the other hand, it’s unclear now if home care workers and higher education workers are destined for a similar fate.
Both groups of workers were included in the bills as they were originally filed.
But the House version of the bill that passed on Tuesday excludes campus workers. And the Senate version of the bill excludes home care workers.
It’s not clear to me why campus workers got removed from the House bill. On the Senate bill, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D-Mount Vernon) said there are financial concerns about expanding collective bargaining rights to home care workers and that a study on the issue was in the works. He suggested to me that he wants to see campus workers get collective bargaining rights.
“I used to work in the JMU campus cafeteria and I support the ability of our campus workers to organize,” he said in a text to me.
