In Virginia, the Democratic state legislature is likely to adopt legislation that requires local governments to engage in collective bargaining with public-employee unions. If the local government and the union can’t agree on a big wage hike, an arbitrator will still be able to order the big wage hike if the arbitrator thinks it is a good idea. That means huge costs for local governments, which will likely result in property tax increases.
Democratic legislators don’t mind imposing those big costs on local governments. But local governments do — even some controlled by Democrats. The Democratic head of the Prince William County School Board called the bill “The single largest tax increase in Virginia history.”
WJLA reports:
The Prince William County School Board Chair is slamming a bill, supported by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, that would expand collective bargaining for public sector employees.
“This new bill wants to mandate collective bargaining and mandate what’s called binding arbitration, which forces districts to pay a salary based on some unelected person who’s an arbitrator who tells us what we have to do,” School Board Chairman Babur Lateef told me. “And we don’t agree with that. We don’t believe that should be done for any school division in the state or any locality. We believe local governments should have the right to choose whether they want to collectively bargain or not, and it shouldn’t be mandated. The current bill, as it stands, doesn’t fund the mandate, so the state wants to mandate it, but they don’t want to pay for it. If this bill passes, it will be the single largest tax increase in Virginia history, because all of the responsibility for these payments and salaries will be on the localities, local taxpayers, property taxes, and everyone in communities, and it will bankrupt local governments and bankrupt school divisions.”
As an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch explains,
In states like California, New York and Illinois, union bosses have monopoly power over government employees, which has led many [local governments in] those states to the brink of bankruptcy.
Apparently unfazed by what has gone wrong elsewhere, Virginia House Speaker Don Scott, D-Portsmouth, and Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, are now putting unionizing every government employee in the state agenda….Surovell publicly vowed to deliver on Service Employees International Union‘s (SEIU) top objective in Richmond this year, legislation empowering Big Labor to codetermine with elected officials and their appointees how roughly 500,000 front-line civil servants, plus roughly 40,000 currently self-employed home health workers, are compensated and managed….
The state monopoly bargaining laws that are already on the books in states like California, which Scott and Surovell want to replicate in Virginia, make it impossible to implement important policy decisions without government union bosses’ acquiescence.
The result is always higher taxes and less responsive public services.
The impact is consistently bad, but it is especially disastrous when it comes to public education.
As economist Christos Makridis documented in a recent study, teacher union bosses routinely, and with chilling effectiveness, wield their monopoly bargaining privileges to sway school districts to hire additional non-teaching staff rather than deploy resources in a variety of other ways that are much more likely to have a positive impact on student achievement.
Out-of-control hiring of “educators” who never set foot in a classroom, occurring in states where government union bosses wield extensive monopoly power, is arguably the single most important reason why, since 1970, cost-of-living-adjusted spending per student in America’s K-12 government schools has ballooned by roughly 170%.
Analyses that properly account for demographic differences among the 50 states….indicate that state policies facilitating the coercive unionization of public K-12 employees actually harm educational outcomes even as they drive up costs for taxpayers. Evidence in 2026 clearly confirms the research.
