Spanberger insists she’s OK with collective bargaining in theory, just not in practice. To those ends, she sought to have the bill amended. Where the legislature’s bill required government agencies to bargain with their workers’ union once a majority of workers had voted to certify that union as their representative, Spanberger’s amendment merely permitted government agencies to bargain if they so chose, and unlike the legislature’s bill, her amendments also didn’t require even those government agencies that opted to grant workers bargaining rights to bargain over wages and working conditions. Her amendments also specifically denied bargaining rights to workers at the state’s Port Authority and its universities (faculty, staff, teaching and research assistants, as well as university hospital staff) and delayed applying the law to local governments until January 1, 2030—the day that Spanberger will be termed out of office.
In addition to the amendments she formally proposed, sources tell me that she also floated another one that would have required unions to win a majority of the votes of all the workers in the agency they sought to unionize, not just a majority of those who voted. That this is the substance of a new Florida law enacted at the insistence of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis apparently didn’t keep Spanberger’s people from testing this out with some Democratic legislators, who instantly shot it down. Nor were her people embarrassed by the fact that, like almost all American elected officials, Spanberger had won office with the backing of nowhere near a majority of all voting-age constituents. (The population of voting-age Virginians is roughly 6,930,000; when Spanberger was elected last November—with enough votes to defeat her opponent by a robust 15 percentage points—she won 1,976,857 votes, or just 28.5 percent of the total number of voting-age Virginians.)
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