VACPUSA

TN Long

Update: A version of this article has been posted to People’s World

Over 27,000 Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) workers won union elections for both of their bargaining units on Monday under the Fairfax Education Unions (FEU). Around 14,000 teachers and 13,000 support staff will be represented by an alliance between the local Fairfax chapters of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which will increase union coverage in Virginia by at least 15% per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The two union election victories were for the two bargaining units within the FEU: the licensed instructional unit for all workers requiring a license, such as teachers, counselors, social workers, psychologists, librarians, and speech language pathologists; and the operational unit for workers such as various kinds of assistants, cafeteria workers, custodians, transportation workers, and front office staff. Anyone with hiring or firing power are not in these bargaining units and will seek their own representation.

Other Recent Labor Organizing in Virginia

There’s been a flurry of union organizing activity in the Commonwealth lately as well, particularly in Northern Virginia with the Northern Virginia Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, headed by Ginny Diamond, whom this reporter has personally seen at all sorts of labor events (big and small) and county council meetings (even for unions not in the AFL-CIO). In an interview with local labor organizer Chris Townsend, he had estimated around 15,000 public and private workers had been organized in Virginia in the past 5 years, not including yesterday’s election.

Public sector

• Teamsters has been organizing county service workers
• United Electrical (UE) has recruited 900 members, mostly in the southeast
• SEIU has organized county workers in Fairfax and Loudoun counties
• CWA has organized college workers
• ATU has one of the most militant locals in Northern Virginia (ATU Local 689), which also recently won a strike for employees of the Fairfax Connector bus service
• AFT, NEA, and AAUP are organizing education workers elsewhere in the Commonwealth
• IAFF has organized city fire departments and won collective bargaining agreements, recently in Richmond
• AFSCME has also had successes in organizing
• Several police unions are also active. (Note: Virginia also has laws in place giving many of the same benefits to police as they do firefighters)

Private sector

• Unite Here has organized 1500 college food service workers
• Workers United has organized 30 units (mostly Starbucks stores)
• Operating Engineers (IUOE) has organized 19 new units
• The News Guild organized a Politico outlet in Northern Virginia
• IBEW recruited 1000 new members
• UFCW gained a couple hundred in Suffolk
• SEIU organized workers at both Dulles International and Ronald Reagan National Airports in Northern Virginia
• IATSE, the Iron Workers Union, and the Machinists Union (IAMAW) have also made gains lately

History

FCPS is the ninth-largest school district in the country and Fairfax County is one of the richest counties in the country. While the Virginia General Assembly and governorship changes hands between Democrats and Republicans regularly, the unique combination of a Democratic majority win in the statehouse in 2019 and a lame duck Democrat governor and pressure from local labor federations across the Commonwealth lead to a law which had banned collective bargaining by public sector employees to be repealed in 2021 which also gave local governments the option to grant the right to collective bargaining to their employees. It took another two years of pressure from organized labor on the Democratic-super-majority FCPS School Board for them to finally grant collective bargaining rights to education workers in 2023.

This is the first time FCPS will have had a union contract since 1977. Townsend went into the history of collusion to crush organized labor in the Old Dominion: 47 years ago organized labor in Virginia was attempting to repeal right-to-work, but had fallen just short of being able to do so. In retaliation, Segregationist Democrats (Dixiecrats) and Republicans chose to punish the unions for daring to challenge capitalist power. Since Virginia was already a right-to-work state, the only thing they could do to make things more hostile to unions was to make it illegal for any government within the Commonwealth to recognize a union or have a contract. In the interim while collective bargaining was banned, there were education workers who joined the NEA or AFT which operated more along the lines of a solidarity union and had to rely on the internal employer HR frameworks and court systems for any kind of labor disputes.

Over the rest of the 70s and 80s, the Dixiecrats would fully defect over to the Republicans and the Democrats would reconstitute themselves primarily in areas with larger numbers of people who were college-educated, Black, immigrants, in the military, from out-of-state, or some combination thereof. These areas generally had the fastest economic expansion and labor base which also formed the Democratic voter base in places like Northern Virginia, Richmond, Tidewater, and Charlottesville.

Road to today

Most Virginia Democrats are bosses

Townsend would further elaborate that while the new Democrats that came in weren’t the Dixiecrats of old, they weren’t necessarily the best on labor either. Despite having a solid Democratic majority and the governorship, it still took four years overall from the time of getting that majority, to taking two years to repeal the collective bargaining ban, to taking another two years to ultimately have the right granted to the FCPS employees, all from Democrats who claimed to always support collective bargaining. In his words, “it’s because most Virginia Democrats are bosses.” He cautioned that unions ought to back stronger labor supporters as candidates due to fascist Republicans being openly hostile to organized labor and neoliberal machine Democrats generally paying little more than lip service without a ton of pressure from below, since, “Three-quarters of union gains in Virginia are public sector, so we’re one or two bad elections away from being wiped out. Guaranteed that there’s emergency meetings happening over this.”

Three-quarters of union gains in Virginia are public sector, so we’re one or two bad elections away from being wiped out

Overall he remained hopeful about the ability of the labor movement to remain persistent in Virginia, especially given the effort of the local labor federations and organizers of all ages. Today was certainly a day for him and everyone in the labor movement to celebrate.