Just two years ago this month, on Nov. 2, 2021, Big Labor Democratic politicians unexpectedly lost control of the Virginia governorship and the Virginia House of Delegates largely because of a highly unpopular stance adopted by nearly all of their party’s state executive and legislative candidates that year.
From gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe on down, Democrats campaigning in the Old Dominion agreed that parents of school-aged children should have far less power over how taxpayer-funded public schools are run than is granted to teacher union officials.
Democratic Virginia politicians’ collective decision to favor special privileges for government union bosses over parents’ right to protect their children from perceived harm was encapsulated by their party’s near unanimous support in early 2020 for legislation ending the Old Dominion’s 30-year-old statutory ban on "exclusive" union bargaining over teachers and other local public employees' pay, benefits, and work rules.
Despite Republican lawmakers’ across-the-board opposition to this scheme, it was ultimately signed into law by then-Gov. Ralph Northam, D-Va.
Government union officials routinely deploy their monopoly-bargaining powers as well as their lobbying muscle to prevent schools from implementing common-sense policies.
A case in point is what happened to a proposal made last fall in New Haven, Conn., to offer $5,000 signing bonuses for prospective teachers in math and roughly 10 other shortage areas while offering substantially smaller bonuses for teachers in fields where new hires are less difficult to recruit.
Practically as soon as teacher union bosses sent a “cease-and-desist” notice, the Board of Education rescinded the bonuses.
In recent years, the teacher union abuse that has surely elicited the most outrage from parents across the country was Big Labor bosses’ largely successful campaign to block the reopening during the 2020-21 academic year of public schools that had been locked down in March 2020, at the outset of COVID-19.
There was no credible medical basis for the extended lockdowns.
Primarily as a consequence of teacher union obstruction, kids in nine states attended class in-person less than 40% of the time over the course of the 2020-21 school year. Eight of these states had extensive government union monopoly bargaining.
Virginia was the sole exception at the time, but as a consequence of its 2020 law giving the green light to the collectivization of government workplaces, which took effect in May 2021, union bosses’ power to dictate how Old Dominion schools and other public institutions are run is now rapidly expanding.
There is a sharp division between elected officials of the state’s two major parties over whether government union bigwigs’ wielding as much clout in Virginia as they do in fiscal sinkhole states like Illinois would be a good thing or a bad thing.
Ever since he assumed the governorship in January 2022, Glenn Youngkin has been pushing for restoration of Virginia’s former long-standing law banning union monopoly-bargaining in the public sector.
In February 2022, the GOP-controlled House voted to reinstate the ban, which was originally signed into law in 1993 by then-Democratic Gov. Doug Wilder.
But in the state Senate last year, all 12 Democrats on the Commerce and Labor Committee thumbed their noses at Wilder as well as Youngkin by voting to perpetuate union rule over teachers and other government employees.
When this campaign cycle wraps up on Nov.7, Virginia’s current Senate Democrats who teamed up with Northam to foist union monopoly bargaining on taxpayers and public servants will finally have to face voters’ verdict in a general election.
Special privileges for union bosses are clearly on the ballot in the Old Dominion this year, but unfortunately you would never know it from the vast majority of the so-called “mainstream” media coverage of the campaigns.
For example, an Oct. 22 article in The Washington Post supposedly highlighting the key issues in the campaign fails to mention any controversy over the teacher union boss-favored lockdowns that recently kept schools across the state shuttered for most of the 2020-21 school year.
Whatever its motivation, the virtual blackout in the "mainstream" media about an issue that captivated Virginia voters in 2021 is a scandal.
And it highlights the critical importance of grass-roots efforts by groups like the National Right to Work Committee to ensure citizens learn about where their candidates stand on issues that the "mainstream" media opt to ignore.
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation and the National Right to Work Committee. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.