To paraphrase the late Rick James: Misinformation is a helluva drug.
Republicans are deploying it in their bid to beat back Virginia Democrats’ redistricting push. And they’re using it to stoke fears about the bill to expand public-sector collective bargaining rights in Virginia.
And last week, The Washington Post’s editorial board—which has become more openly conservative and requires writers to embrace “free markets”—came out against the bill in a piece with some dubious claims about what it would do.
Chief among them was a critique that’s been a common refrain for opponents of the bill: expanding collective bargaining rights would give the state more control over local budgets and result in higher property taxes.
“If the bill is enacted, elected community leaders would lose significant autonomy to national unions and bureaucrats in Richmond,” the Post warned. “The inevitable result would be higher property taxes across the commonwealth.”
The Post, however, failed to back up these claims. My own reading of the bill doesn’t support them. And the bill’s supporters I spoke to contend the Post is wrong.
The Post claimed that a new state agency the bill would establish, the Public Employee Relations Board, would have “the power to rule against local governments in forced arbitration.”
But that’s not what the bill says. The phrase “forced arbitration” does not appear in the bill. And decisions made about stalled contract negotiations by arbitrators, who would be required by law to take into account the financial impacts of their decisions, would still be subject to approval by local governments.
A larger point that’s been missing from the debate about this bill is that it’s less about the tension between state and local control that hangs over so many bills in Virginia, and moreso about expanding workers’ rights.
The bill does not, as the Post claims, require “collective bargaining for wages, benefits, and working conditions for state and local government employees.” It gives these employees the right to do so—or not to. If local government workers in say, Lee County, opt not to form a union, then the county doesn’t have to engage in collective bargaining.
“What we’re talking about is not permission that the state is giving its local government governing bodies,” Moriah Allen, a staff attorney with the Virginia Education Association, told me. “We’re talking about rights that the state is giving its public sector workers.”
