Educators Win Precedent-Setting Fight for Collective Bargaining Rights, Richmond, Va.

- Virginia had a 43-year prohibition on collective bargaining for local government workers up until 2020.
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- Truthout, Labor Notes, Feb. 27, 2022.

Teachers and other public school employees in Richmond, Virginia, won a major victory in December when the city’s school board, in an 8 to 1 vote, approved a resolution granting them collective bargaining rights. The victory sets a precedent for other districts and public sector employees throughout the state. Richmond is the first school district in Virginia to reinstate collective bargaining rights, after the legislature in 2020 lifted the state’s 43-year prohibition on collective bargaining for local government workers.

Members of the school board had made repeated attempts to delay the vote. Winning took a mass mobilization led by the Richmond Education Association, which convened district-wide workers’ assemblies, held rallies outside school board meetings, and shared dozens of teacher testimonies during public comment periods. What finally passed was a compromise resolution stating that the union and the school district can each bring only two bargaining issues to the table for the first negotiated contract, which will last three years.

Still, by overturning the sweeping ban on contract negotiations, this compromise opens the terrain to expand union power in every school building.

- Patchwork of Rights: Under the new state law, which took effect May 1, 2021, each governing body (such as a school board) can vote to authorize collective bargaining rights for its employees, after which the union is permitted to hold an authorization vote among the workers. This means there will be a patchwork of public sector bargaining rights throughout the state. Virginia’s anti-union right-to-work law remains in effect; so does its draconian ban on public sector strikes. Bargaining is still banned for state employees.

Virginia banned negotiations with public sector unions in 1946 to break the power of Local 550 of the CIO-affiliated State, County, and Municipal Workers of America, the all-Black union at the University of Virginia hospital. In 1971 a federal district court found this prohibition unconstitutional, and public sector unions were authorized to negotiate contracts. But in 1977, the state Supreme Court reinstated the ban on bargaining for all public sector employees in the state, including those employed by local entities like Richmond Public Schools...

https://truthout.org/articles/richmond-educators-win-precedent-setting-fight-for-collective-bargaining-rights/