J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
A great deal of attention has been paid to the labor movement’s recent breakthrough organizing victories in the historically anti-union South, and rightly so. The triumphs of the United Auto Workers in Tennessee and the United Steelworkers in Georgia showed that the combination of workers’ growing understanding of their own power, and unions’ investment in long-term organizing can overcome the entrenched opposition of the local and regional power structures.
That said, the largest successful organizing campaign in a once-Confederate state has largely gone underreported. Last week, the school employees in Fairfax, Virginia’s largest county, voted by decisive margins to join the Fairfax Education Unions, which is a district-wide alliance of the nation’s two teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). The new local will represent 27,000 district employees—both teachers and support workers such as school bus drivers.
Fairfax, to be sure, is part of the Northern South; it’s a suburb of D.C. But until recently, it was under the thumb of a state law that was Deep South worker-repressive. Virginia is still a right-to-work state for its private-sector workers. Whether public-sector workers, who are not covered under the National Labor Relations Act, can bargain collectively is up to the individual states. Employees of the state of Virginia have never been accorded that right, and employees of local governments (such as school districts) had that right taken away from them by a 1977 state supreme court ruling. (Not that there were many Virginia localities at that point that would even consider having a unionized workforce.)
Despite those legal handcuffs, some public-sector unions, watching the growing urbanization and liberalization of Virginia’s metro areas (those around D.C. and those around Richmond), began to build chapters in those regions. “Fairfax required a prolonged fight,” says Randi Weingarten, the AFT’s president. “It began in 2015, when we fought a ballot measure putting right-to-work in the state’s constitution. We kept trying to get the governors and the legislature to support collective bargaining in the public sector.” That required Democratic trifecta control of both legislative houses and the governor’s office, which Democrats finally won in 2019. In February of 2020—right before COVID closed down the schools and much else—a state law was passed and signed by Gov. Ralph Northam that undid the 1977 court ruling by legalizing collective bargaining for local government employees. Once the schools reopened, the NEA successfully organized Richmond teachers, and now, both unions have racked up a major victory in Fairfax.
The victory is the largest, numerically, that the AFT has won in several decades. And with Virginia’s rate of unionization at a paltry Southern-state level of 4.3 percent, the victory will actually increase the number of Virginians working under a collective bargaining agreement by 12 percent.
Weingarten says the victory reflects the steady increase in the public’s awareness of the need for unions to better workers’ lives. She cites not only the Pew and Gallup polls showing unions’ approval rating is at 50-year highs, but also polling that shows that teachers unions—a go-to target for Republican vilification for decades—have also experienced a huge increase in their level of public support. A 2010 poll by Hart Research showed that voters disapproved of teachers unions then by a 41 percent to 20 percent margin, while parents of school-age children disapproved of them by 37 percent to 20 percent. But teachers unions’ approval ratings have risen steadily since then, as their support for smaller class sizes, more wraparound child services, and more and better vocational curricula won the backing of schoolchildren’s parents. Today, a Hart poll from earlier this year showed those 2010 figures have been more than entirely reversed: Voters now approve of teachers unions by a 45 percent to 21 percent margin, and parents approve of them by 53 percent to 15 percent.
There are still some in labor who adhere to the syndicalist belief that state power and the political action required to win it merely distract unions from their real goal of organizing workers. That certainly never made sense in the case of public-sector employees, and that of private-sector employees, too. The changed law resulting from Virginia Democrats’ 2019 electoral victories, and the changed rules for private-sector workers that have been implemented by President Biden’s NLRB appointees, make very clear that unions have to organize workers and help organize political electoral victories, too, if they are to really win collective bargaining for the nation’s workers. As the teachers and school bus drivers in Fairfax County can readily attest.
