Virginia lawmakers started off the 2026 General Assembly considering potentially transformative legislation to extend full and equal collective bargaining rights to all state and local government employees, including home care workers. The benefits of such a law would extend far beyond public employees themselves—improving the quality of public services, health care, education, and economic outcomes for all Virginians. But these benefits could be severely limited if lawmakers decide to once again leave some workers behind, deepening existing inequities.
Divergent Senate and House bills threaten to leave home care and higher education workers behind
In late February, the Virginia House and Senate each passed separate versions of collective bargaining legislation. Both bills stray from the inclusive vision of original bill drafts: The Senate bill (SB378) excludes home care workers and the House version (HB1263) excludes most higher education workers. Either of these occupational carveouts would deny collective bargaining rights to some of the lowest-paid workers in Virginia and deepen already large racial and gender pay gaps.
In the next week, lawmakers will negotiate a final version to send to Governor Spanberger—making this a critical juncture for Virginia’s future.
Inclusive state collective bargaining legislation is urgently needed to address staffing shortages and large public-sector pay gaps that especially affect women and workers of color who are disproportionately represented in frontline public service, education, and caregiving occupations. State collective bargaining legislation that covers everyone, with no carveouts, is also necessary to right decades-old wrongs. Congress first included Jim Crow-era occupational carveouts that excluded both public employees and home care workers (categorized as “domestic workers”) from federal labor law in 1935. Virginia in turn instituted a ban on state employee collective bargaining amid 1940s white supremacist backlash to the unionization of Black hospital employees at the University of Virginia. 2026 is Virginia’s long-overdue opportunity to repudiate this history—but only if coverage for home care and campus workers is restored before a final bill is passed.
Collective bargaining is critical for Virginia’s higher education and care economy systems
Collective bargaining for home care workers is crucial at a moment when Virginia is already facing an acute shortage of health care workers and Virginia home care worker wages have fallen far below the cost of living. Carving home care workers out of the new collective bargaining law would mean excluding the estimated 28,000 consumer-directed in-home caregivers who are paid by state Medicaid dollars to provide essential direct care that allows elderly, disabled, or chronically ill Virginians to remain in their homes.
Carving higher education out of the new collective bargaining law would mean excluding most state employees—including the UVA nurses whose attempt to pursue a union contract was first blocked by the Virginia Assembly in 1946. Data from 2025 indicate Virginia’s colleges and universities employ over 84,000 full-time workers, making up 58% of all salaried and wage executive branch full-time employees.[1]
At a moment when both labor rights and higher education are facing intense, direct attacks from the Trump administration, it’s more important than ever for states like Virginia to ensure that campus workers—including faculty, graduate assistants, and housekeeping, janitorial, and clerical staff—have a voice on the job and the ability to collectively advocate for themselves, their students, and their institutions. In states where higher education workers have full labor rights, unionized workers are better positioned to advocate for public policies and funding choices that benefit their students and their states’ economies. Since January 2025, higher education unions have been among the few organizations equipped to wage effective responses to Trump administration attempts to defund scientific research, revoke international student visas, or limit free speech on campuses. Protecting the future quality and accessibility of higher education in Virginia depends on the ability of campus workers to raise their voices collectively.
Lawmakers should reject other features of Senate bill that threaten to limit or indefinitely delay workers’ collective bargaining rights
Other troubling features of the current Senate version of the bill include:
- the removal of health insurance from the list of mandatory subjects of bargaining, and
- language indicating that rather than fully implementing the new law after the proposed “in effect” date of July 2028, a new state labor board would be given discretion to “evaluate” bargaining units and determine “whether the authority to collectively bargain should be phased in by bargaining unit over an appropriate period of time and, if so, the schedule of such phase-in for each bargaining unit.”
The ability to negotiate over health insurance is critically important both for employees and employers. In the public sector, unions and units of state or local government can most effectively bargain contracts that serve the public interest and address mutual needs (including improving employee recruitment and retention to improve services) when they are able to consider wages and benefits as part of overall compensation packages. Allowing employers to refuse to discuss health insurance at the bargaining table would undermine one of the key goals of a collective bargaining statute.
Likewise, proposed language to allow the new state labor board to pick and choose which groups of unionized workers can begin bargaining on an undetermined, variable schedule would leave Virginia public employees right back where they started: wondering whether they’ll be treated differently from their peers depending on where they live and work and whether they will have an equal opportunity to exercise the collective bargaining rights promised in the law. Opening the door to indefinite delays in implementation of the new law for some workers is unnecessary when the proposed “in effect” date of July 2028 already provides over a year for a new state agency to hire staff and develop necessary regulations.
Seizing the moment for Virginia workers
Virginia Assembly members and Governor Spanberger should seize the historic opportunity to enact inclusive, comprehensive collective bargaining legislation. That starts with restoring home care workers and higher education workers to proposed legislation, maintaining health insurance as a mandatory bargaining subject, and implementing the new law in a uniform, timely manner.
All public employees deserve full and equal labor rights, and all Virginians deserve to begin reaping the broad economic and social benefits collective bargaining can bring to the state. Denying, limiting, or delaying collective bargaining rights won’t stop Virginia public employees from organizing to improve their workplaces and the services, education, and care they provide—but it will leave units of state and local government with no standard framework and no state agency support for addressing the important issues and inequities workers are seeking to address. Instead, it’s time for Virginia to take long-overdue steps to ensure all workers who want a union have a legal pathway to pursue one, regardless of their occupation or zip code.
[1] UVA Health staff are counted as college/university staff in this dataset, though VCU Health staff are not counted as state executive branch employees.