This week was a key deadline for all legislation under consideration in the General Assembly. A key labor bill failed to meet the deadline.
Virginia's Right to Work Law was signed in 1947 by Governor Bill Tuck, a Democrat from Halifax County. Ever since that time, employers have been prohibited from forcing employees to join a union.
Senator Jennifer Carroll Foy is a Democrat from Prince William County who introduced legislation to repeal the Right to Work law, but the senators rejected the bill by failing to ever consider it – essentially forcing it to miss a key deadline this week.
"So, it's really unfortunate that the bill to repeal the so-called Right to Work died in darkness and it wasn't brought forth in the Commerce and Labor Committee for a full hearing," Carroll Foy says. "I believe that if Virginians were allowed to have their voices heard, that it may have been successful."
Virginia Diamond is president of the Northern Virginia Labor Federation, and she's confident Democrats will eventually get rid of what she calls an anti-union law.
"It's definitely going to happen. You can't have a trifecta of Democrats and go four years and not grant private sector workers the right to collectively bargain, Diamond says."
A similar bill in the House of Delegates failed six years ago under similar circumstances. The Democrats who controlled the House at the time failed to ever put it on the calendar, and so it was never considered. As a result, none of the Democrats in the General Assembly have a voting record on this issue.
