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Unions Decry Spanberger Veto of Collective Bargaining Bill as ‘Betrayal to Virginia's Workers’
“We believed that she was being authentic and honest with us," said one Virginia labor leader. "She just flat-out flipped."
May 15, 2026
Labor unions are feeling betrayed after Virginia's Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger vetoed a bill on Thursday that would have restored collective bargaining rights for half a million public sector workers.
Virginia is one of the most restrictive states in the country for public sector bargaining, a holdover from the Jim Crow era when the General Assembly and other state legislatures across the South sought to crush the power of a public workforce with many Black employees.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, Virginia has one of the largest public sector pay gaps in the country, with state and local government employees making about 27% less on average than their private-sector peers, and it is similarly stratified in other states with weak collective bargaining rights.
Spanberger, a former US representative who was elected governor this past November, made pro-union messaging central to her affordability-focused platform. She decried President Donald Trump's executive order stripping federal workers of collective bargaining rights last year and said that as governor, she'd "look forward to working with members of our General Assembly to make sure more Virginians can negotiate for the benefits and fair treatment that they earn.”
But since taking office, Spanberger's support for restoring public sector union rights has been more tepid as she's gotten an earful from fiscally conservative Right-to-Work and taxpayer advocacy groups who claimed higher salaries for public employees would drain state funds and raise the cost of services.
When a bill to immediately mandate collective bargaining rights to 500,000 workers was proposed in the Democratic-controlled General Assembly, she introduced amendments aimed at watering down the bill—making it optional for employers to recognize unions, delaying the full implementation until 2030, and introducing what unions called a "kill-switch" that would have allowed future governors to revoke collective bargaining power.
The legislature shot Spanberger's amendments down and passed the bill in its original form. On Thursday, the governor vetoed it altogether.
In her veto message, Spanberger said she wanted the bill's other collective bargaining provisions for state employees, home care workers, and higher education employees to go into effect first "in order to demonstrate the efficacy of this new system" before it was opened up to all public employees.
But the unions that advocated for the bill say Spanberger led workers on with false promises.
"This veto is a devastating betrayal to the hundreds of thousands of public employees who have spent years, and in many cases decades, fighting for a seat at the table," said Doris Crouse-Mays, the president of the Virginia AFL-CIO. "Spanberger campaigned publicly and privately on promises [of] affordability, to support working families and respect workers' rights... Instead, when presented with the opportunity to make history and deliver on those promises, she chose to side with fear, political calculation, business, and the same anti-worker arguments that have been used for generations to deny workers power in Virginia."
LaNoral Thomas, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Virginia 512—a union which helped lead the charge to pass the bill—told the Virginia news site Dogwood that her union had "high hopes" for Spanberger when she was elected.
“We believed that she was being authentic and honest with us," Thomas said. "She just flat-out flipped. It is shocking.”
"Public employees are not a special interest. They are our neighbors. They are the educators, bus drivers, social workers, librarians, custodians, and first responders who hold our communities together," said a joint statement from Carol Bauer, president of the Virginia Education Association, and Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association.
They emphasized that the veto also carried "a deep racial and gender impact," noting that "Virginia’s public sector bargaining ban is rooted in a Jim Crow era effort to silence Black workers at the University of Virginia Hospital who organized for fair pay and dignity." They said, "Preserving that legacy today disproportionately harms women and workers of color, who make up so much of the public-service workforce and who have the most to gain from fair wages, safer workplaces, and a real voice on the job."
Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)—the largest national union of public sector workers in the US, with more than 1.4 million members—said that Spanberger had caved to "anti-worker extremists [who] have sidelined working people while starving the public services Virginia families rely on, earning the state a reputation as one of the most anti-worker in the country."
"While the governor has broken her word," Saunders said, "AFSCME members are deeply grateful to the bill’s sponsors and the leadership of both chambers, who kept theirs. Their commitment to working people stands in stark contrast to the governor and will not be forgotten."
"Gov. Spanberger made a choice today," he added. "Working people will remember it."
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Miles and Miles of Protest in Bolivia as Miners and Unions March Against Privatization and Low Wages
Peasants' unions and other groups are protesting a law that they say would allow corporate control of small farmers' land, as well as fuel shortages and a low minimum wage.
May 14, 2026
An economic crisis and the repeal of a crucial gas subsidy, fuel shortages, and a law that opponents say will allow the encroachment of corporate interests on Indigenous and peasant lands are among the central concerns of thousands of miners and other workers who have joined a march from Bolivia's northern Amazon territories to La Paz, with a major miners union in the capital joining the protest on Wednesday.
The Federation of Mining Cooperatives of La Paz and an influential peasant union met land workers and Indigenous representatives this week as they arrived in the capital after having marched 1,100 kilometers (683 miles) "for over 20 days from the tropics into freezing high-altitude terrain, many wearing nothing more substantial on their feet than plastic sandals," as Olivia Arigho-Stiles reported at Jacobin.
At least 50 marchers required medical treatment last week for exhaustion, dehydration, and other ailments, but the unions are showing no sign of ending the general strike that was begun by Bolivian Workers’ Central (COB), with the mass mobilization also including at least 70 road blockades around the country, according to the Bolivia Highway Association.
TeleSUR reported that the entry of the miners union signified "a substantial increase in pressure" on right-wing President Rodrigo Paz, whose resignation some workers' organizations are calling for.
The Federation of Mining Cooperatives joined the ongoing marches and protests after Paz failed to attend a scheduled dialogue. Miners have been alarmed by the scarcity of fuel, "a dire shortage of essential explosive material, and significant delays in the liberation of new areas designated for mining exploitation," reported TeleSUR.
The broader protests began in response to stagnant, low wages as well as Law 1720, which the government has claimed will benefit small-scale farmers by allowing them to obtain mortgages after converting their smallholdings into "medium-size" businesses.
But Roger Adan Chambi, an Aymara lawyer and specialist in Indigenous land law, told Jacobin that the measure was passed "without consulting the sectors it was supposed to benefit (peasants and small producers), jeopardizing legal security and constitutional guarantees regarding land ownership."
“Far from being an opportunity for small producers to access credit, this law weakens the property rights of peasants and Indigenous communities, especially those resisting on the agricultural frontier,” Chambi said. “Structural insecurity and the lack of basic services will, in the future, force them to mortgage or sell their plots, facilitating dispossession and the transfer of land to corporations.”
Oscar Cardoza, a peasant union leader and a representative of the marchers, declared at a public gathering in La Paz this week: “Our life is collective, not individual. The land must be respected; it’s not for sale.”
Al Jazeera reported that the end of a fuel subsidy, which was cut after Paz took office last year during what he called an "economic, financial, energy, and social emergency," also pushed COB to issue the call for a general strike.
The subsidy had been crucial for working Bolivians, and the cut has made quality fuel increasingly inaccessible.
"Starting today, a general, indefinite, and active strike is declared, until the government understands the people’s demands,” COB secretary-general Mario Argollo told a group of 1,000 supporters on May 1.
The union is also calling for a 20% increase to the nation’s minimum wage, which currently sits at 3,300 bolivianos ($477.71) per month.
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May Day 2026: What Kind of Nation Will This Be?
This year's May Day rallies go beyond workers’ rights.
May 01, 2026
Unlike the rest of the world's democracies, the United States doesn't use the metric system, doesn't require employers to provide workers with paid vacations, hasn't abolished the death penalty, and doesn't celebrate May Day as an official national holiday.
Outside the US, May 1 is international workers' day, observed with speeches, rallies and demonstrations. This year, millions of workers in Europe, Asia and Latin America will take to the streets to demand higher wages, better benefits and improved working conditions.
Ironically, this celebration of working-class solidarity was started by the US labor movement and soon spread around the world, but it never earned official recognition in this country.
This year, on the heels of the three massive nationwide “No Kings” marches and rallies, millions of Americans will join forces, in thousands of cities and towns, in May Day Strong events.
The May Day Strong organizers hoping to bring Americans together to challenge the billionaires, big corporations, and the Trump administration, who have manipulated the rules to lower living standards, attack immigrants, undermine democracy, and direct tax dollars for wars rather than meeting human needs. It will be a day of rallies, marches, teach-ins, labor actions, and a refusal to participate in business as usual—because, as the organizers say, “when those at the top rig the system, collective action is how we set it right.”
Organizers expect over several thousand nonviolent actions across the country. The broad coalition behind the protests include major unions, civil rights, reproductive justice, environmental, immigrant rights, and faith groups, and tenant and community organizations, as well as Indivisible and Democratic Socialists of America.
The protest is inspired by the large day of action on January 23 that shut down much of Minneapolis by asking people not to work, shop, or attend school that day to challenge ICE’s occupation and its illegal actions (including murder) against immigrants and activists.
But the May Day Strong leaders are not calling for a general strike to shut down the economy. That tactic—allowing unions to strike in solidarity with other unions’ strikes—was banned in 1946 when Congress passed the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry Truman’s veto. Even so, organizers view this year’s May Day events as a dress rehearsal something close to a general strike in 2028, in anticipation of the presidential and mid-term elections, but that would require the participation of many large unions who may not believe they and their members are prepared for such a militant action or the possible political backlash by the Trump administration and by voters if employers threaten to fire workers for engaging in an illegal strike. In addition, as Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch noted, “How many people would need to stop shopping to make a noticeable dent in the nearly $3 billion per day Americans spend?””
But another massive national day of protest this May Day could help inspire voters to oust more Trump Republicans in November, give Democrats a majority of seats in both the House and Senate, and lay the groundwork for a more progressive policy agenda if the Democrats take back the White House in two years.
In doing so, they will be honoring the original May Day, which was born of the movement for an eight-hour workday. After the Civil War, unregulated capitalism ran rampant in America. It was the Gilded Age, a time of merger mania, increasing concentration of wealth and growing political influence by corporate power brokers known as Robber Barons. New technologies made possible new industries, which generated great riches for the fortunate few, but at the expense of workers, many of them immigrants, who worked long hours, under dangerous conditions, for little pay.
As the gap between the rich and other Americans widened dramatically, workers began to resist in a variety of ways. The first major wave of labor unions pushed employers to limit the workday to ten hours and then later down to eight hours. The 1877 strike by tens of thousands of railroad, factory and mine workers—which shut down the nation's major industries and was brutally suppressed by the corporations and their friends in government—was the first of many mass actions to demand living wages and humane working conditions. By 1884, the campaign had gained enough momentum that the predecessor to the American Federation of Labor adopted a resolution at its annual meeting, "that eight hours shall constitute legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886."
On the appointed date, unions and radical groups orchestrated strikes and large-scale demonstrations in cities across the country. More than 500,000 workers went on strike or marched in solidarity and many more people protested in the streets. In Chicago, a labor stronghold, at least 30,000 workers struck. Rallies and parades across the city more than doubled that number, and the May 1 demonstrations continued for several days. The protests were mostly nonviolent, but they included skirmishes with strikebreakers, company-hired thugs and police.
On May 3, at a rally outside the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company factory, police fired on the crowd, killing at least two workers. The next day, at a rally at Haymarket Square to protest the shootings, police moved in to clear the crowd. Someone threw a bomb at the police, killing at least one officer. Another seven policemen were killed during the ensuing riot, and police gunfire killed at least four protesters and injured many others.
After a controversial investigation, seven anarchists were sentenced to death for murder, while another was sentenced to 15 years in prison. The anarchists won global notoriety, being seen as martyrs by many radicals and reformers, who viewed the trial and executions as politically motivated.
Within a few years, unions and radical groups around the world had established May Day as an international holiday to commemorate the Haymarket martyrs and continue the struggle for the eight-hour day, workers' rights, and social justice.
In the United States, however, the burgeoning Knights of Labor, uneasy with May Day's connection to anarchists and other radicals, adopted another day to celebrate workers' rights. In 1887, Oregon was the first state to make Labor Day an official holiday, celebrated in September. Other states soon followed. Unions sponsored parades to celebrate Labor Day, but such one-day festivities didn't make corporations any more willing to grant workers decent conditions. To make their voices heard, workers had to resort to massive strikes, typically put down with brutal violence by government troops.
In 1894, the American Railway Union, led by Eugene Debs, went on strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company to demand lower rents (Pullman was a company town that owned its employees' homes) and higher pay following huge layoffs and wage cuts. In solidarity with the Pullman workers, railroad workers across the country boycotted the trains with Pullman cars, paralyzing the nation's economy as well as its mail service. President Grover Cleveland declared the strike a federal crime and called out 12,000 soldiers to break the strike. They crushed the walkout and killed at least two protesters. Six days later, Cleveland—facing worker protests for his repression of the Pullman strikers—signed a bill creating Labor Day as an official national holiday in September. He hoped that giving the working class a day off to celebrate one Monday a year might pacify them.
For most of the 20th century, Labor Day was reserved for festive parades, picnics and speeches sponsored by unions in major cities. But contrary to what President Cleveland had hoped, American workers, their families and allies, found other occasions to mobilize for better working conditions and a more humane society. America witnessed massive strike waves throughout the century, including militant general strikes and occupations. These included a general strike in Seattle in 1919, the 1934 San Francisco general strike, led by the longshoremen's union; a strike of about 400,000 textile workers that same year; militant sit-down strikes in 1937 by autoworkers in Flint, Michigan, women workers at Woolworth's department stores in New York, aviation workers in Los Angeles, and others, and the largest strike wave in US history in 1946, triggered by pent-up demands following World War Two.
May 1 faded away as a day of protest. From the 1920s through the 1950s, radical groups sought to keep the tradition alive with parades and other events, but the mainstream labor movement and most liberal organizations kept their distance, making May Day an increasingly marginal affair. In 1958, in the midst of the cold war, President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 as Loyalty Day. Each subsequent president has issued a similar proclamation, although few Americans know about or celebrate the day.
Since 2001, American unions and immigrant rights activists have resurrected May 1 as a day of protest around both workers’ rights and immigrant rights. That year, millions of people in over 100 cities—including more than a million in Los Angeles, 200,000 in New York and 300,000 in Chicago—participated in May Day demonstrations.
The huge turnout was catalyzed by a bill, sponsored by Representative James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and passed by the House the previous December, that would have classified as a felon anyone who helped undocumented immigrants enter or remain in the United States. Since then, immigrant workers and their allies have adopted May Day as an occasion for protest.
In 2006, organized launched a protest they called “A Day Without Immigrants,” which was also termed the “Great American Boycott.” In many cities, workers refused to go to work, high school students walked out of their classrooms and into the street, while consumers shut down businesses that depended on immigrant workers.
In 2017, activists organized another “Day Without Immigrants” protest to dramatize the importance of immigrants to the American economy and protest Trump’s plans to build a border wall and deport millions of undocumented immigrants. The organizers called for immigrants and allies not to go to work, to avoid spending money, and keep children home from school.
"It was mostly immigrants who led the first May Day movement for the eight-hour day. Now a new generation of immigrant workers have revitalized and brought May Day back to life," observed California State Senator María Elena Durazo, the former head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.
Although the labor movement fell on hard times starting in the 1950s, it nevertheless helped guarantee that more Americans would share in the nation’s post-war prosperity and join the middle class. Moreover, the civil rights, feminist, environmental and gay rights movements, and the more recent immigrant rights movement, drew important lessons from labor movement tactics and built coalitions with organized labor to advance their goals.
America is now in the midst of a new Gilded Age with a new group of corporate Robber Barons, many of them operating on a global scale. The top of the income scale has the biggest concentration of income and wealth since 1928. Several decades of corporate-backed assaults on unions have left only six percent of private sector employees with union cards, down from about one-third of all workers in the 1950s. More than half of America's 15 million union members now work for government (representing 33 percent of all government employees), so business groups and conservative politicians, including Trump, have targeted public sector unions for destruction.
Despite this, we’ve seen a recent resurgence of activism among rank-and-file workers at fast-food chains, Starbucks, Amazon, Ford, General Motors and Stellantis, Volkswagen, Boeing, Trader Joe’s, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Chipotle, Disneyland, Kaiser Permanente, UPS, Uber and LYFT, REI, film companies and TV studios, meatpacking companies, major hospitals and universities, school districts, and other employers. They have waged strikes, walkouts and union recognition campaigns to win better pay and working conditions.
Public opinion in solidly behind these demands. The decline of union membership is not due to Americans’ opposition to unions. A recent Gallup poll found that 68% of Americans support unions. Support is particularly high among Americans between 18 and 34 years old, 72% of whom embrace unions as a vehicle to address economic inequality and workplace problems. About two-thirds (64%) of Americans think the federal minimum wage—which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009—should be increased to $17.
The biggest obstacle to a union resurgence is federal labor law. American workers understand that employers resort to a variety of antiunion tactics—including firing employees illegally—to thwart unionization efforts. And there’s the rub. Americans have far fewer rights at work than employees in other democratic societies. Current federal laws are an impediment to union organizing rather than a protector of workers’ rights. The rules are stacked against workers, making it extremely difficult for even the most talented organizers to win union elections. Under current law, and with Trump stacking the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union members, any employer with a clever attorney can stall union elections, giving management time to scare the living daylights out of potential recruits.
This year's May Day rallies go beyond workers’ rights. They will focus on issues like stopping the billionaire takeover and rampant corruption of the Trump administration, protecting Medicaid, Social Security, and other programs working people rely on, fully funding public schools, healthcare, and housing for all, and stopping the attacks on communities, including policies that target immigrants and people of color. It will also build momentum for a large-scale voter mobilization effort to elect liberals and progressives in the November mid-terms.
“It isn't just about immigrant rights. It isn't just about workers’ rights on the job or even about raising the standard of living for all workers,” said Durazo. “It's about what kind of country we want to be.”
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