Stronger collective bargaining laws will benefit all Virginians
In 2026, Virginia lawmakers are poised to consider transformative legislation that would extend full collective bargaining rights to public employees at all levels of state and local government. The benefits of comprehensive collective bargaining rights would extend far beyond affected public employees who would enjoy better working conditions. Stronger state collective bargaining laws can help improve the quality of public services and economic outcomes for all Virginians.
Data show that strong collective bargaining laws help states address persistent public-sector pay gaps, reduce staff vacancies and turnover, and lead to higher unionization rates (Morrissey and Sherer 2024). Increased unionization rates are highly correlated with numerous, widely shared benefits including more equitable state economies and healthier democracies (McNicholas et al. 2025).
For Virginia, expanding public-sector bargaining is a critical next step in building an economy that works for all. The expansion will reverse a long history of anti-worker state policies that have suppressed wages and limited workers’ power in the labor market by blocking pathways to unionization. Such policies have resulted in greater income inequality and persistent racial and gender wage disparities (Bivens and Shierholz 2018; Mishel and Bivens 2021). Strong, comprehensive state legislation covering public employees’ labor rights is also especially important at a moment when the federal government has been attacking the jobs, working conditions, and union contracts of over 235,000 federal civil servants residing in Virginia, and threatening long-standing federal protections of all workers’ rights (EPI 2025b; Oakford and Poydock 2025).
This report examines how public-sector workers with limited or no collective bargaining rights fare compared with public-sector workers with well-established collective bargaining rights. To do so, we estimate pay differences between state and local government workers and private-sector workers with similar education and experience. In this analysis, Virginia is among a minority of states in which state employees have no bargaining rights and only some local government employees have limited bargaining rights. By contrast, 27 states have well-established collective bargaining rights for state and local government workers.
https://www.epi.org/publication/stronger-collective-bargaining-laws-will-benefit-all-virginians/