Originally published in the Winter/Spring 2025 edition of the Virginia Defender, issue 76, printed March 26. Reproduced here for accessibility and archival purposes. To find other stories in the Winter/Spring 2025 issue or to download the full PDF, see this post. For other issues dating back to 2012, see the Full Issues page.

By Kat McNeal

House Bill 2764 and its equivalent Senate Bill 917 made it through the General Assembly and to the governor’s desk. On March 24, Gov. Glenn Youngkin vetoed them.

If the governor had signed the bills, they would have fully repealed the prohibition on collective bargaining for Virginia’s public sector workers and created a Public Employee Relations Board.

State employees in Virginia have not had collective bargaining rights since 1946. Local public employees lost the right in the 1970s. In 1993, then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder signed a law that codified the ban.

In 2020, a new law lifting the ban on local governments bargaining with employees was passed and went into effect in 2021. However, it requires each local government and school board to decide whether to bargain with their workers. This means that workers have to fight for their rights locality by locality.

By 2022, six localities had adopted collective bargaining. About 54,000 local government workers now are covered by collective bargaining agreements, still leaving out more than 111,700 workers directly employed by the state.

The 2025 bills, sponsored by Delegate Kathy Tran (D – 18th District) in the House and Sen. Scott Surovell (D – 4th District) in the Senate, would have closed those gaps and given all local and state workers the opportunity to take their seat at the table.

Like previous bills, the legislation prohibited strikes. The bills said that striking public sector workers would be fired and banned from public service for one year.

Incarcerated workers were not covered by the legislation.

One group that was included was police, though the legislation specified that police unions could not represent law enforcement officers in internal investigations involving serious misconduct.

At any rate, on Jan. 24, Youngkin’s spokesperson Christian Martinez told the Virginia Mercury that the governor would not support the legislation – and he did not.

Indeed, Youngkin has set a record for his number of vetos. This year he vetoed 109 bills. Last year he vetoed 201 bills, more than each of the three previous governors vetoed over their entire terms.

So we won’t get statewide collective bargaining this time. But there are 69 Democrats on record as co-sponsors of the bills, meaning they are likely to support similar efforts in a year with a friendlier governor.

And, crucially, the success of these bills shows that the statewide conversation about collective bargaining rights has progressed.

We’ll be watching for a repeat of this legislation in 2026.