For immediate release
DSA Labor Statement on Spanberger Veto of HB1263 and SB378
Date: May 21, 2026
Media Contact: For all press inquiries, please contact media@mdcdsa.org.
Washington, DC: This past Thursday, Democratic governor Abigail Spanberger vetoed House Bill 2363 and Senate Bill 378, which would have restored collective bargaining rights to more than 500,000 public sector workers in Virginia. Metro DC DSA strongly condemns this veto. Workers in Virginia have been without such guaranteed union rights since the Jim Crow era. The state stripped public sector workers of collective bargaining rights in 1946 in response to a group of Black workers organizing a union at the University of Virginia hospital. As her Republican predecessor, Glenn Youngkin, vetoed similar legislation last year, Spanberger’s veto is part of a continuous bi-partisan assault on Virginia’s working class majority, which voted to put her in the governor’s mansion.
These bills enjoy broad popularity within Virginia, as evidenced by them being supported by every single Democrat in the state legislature and overwhelming support from labor unions. This is something Spanberger herself is well aware of: while she declined to support repealing Virginia’s right-to-work legislation she promised to sign public sector collective bargaining rights into law on the campaign trail last year. According to the Economic Policy Institute, these bills would have helped to boost the state’s public-sector unionization rate which, at 14.1%, is the fourth lowest in the country, and narrow one of the largest public-sector pay gaps in the country (state and local government employees in Virginia earn, on average, 26.7% less than private-sector peers with similar education and experience). This would have improved public education and services in the state by reducing crisis-level shortages of educators, first responders, health care workers, and other essential workers. By being so eager to throw the working class under the bus, Spanberger has shown where her allegiances truly lie.
While this action is deeply disappointing, it is not surprising and has proved most Virginia unions that refused to endorse her last year correct. Governor Spanberger is a former CIA intelligence officer, the very same government agency that has suppressed working-class movements for justice at home and abroad. The CIA has spent millions of taxpayer dollars attempting to overthrow other nations’ governments over 72 times, while undermining and splitting labor unions abroad, drowning workers’ hopes in blood in places such as Guatemala, Iran, Congo, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Spanberger has also taken millions from corporations and billionaires, including the Murdochs, Sports Betting Alliance, and Dominion Energy. Our legitimate demands should not be subject to vetoes by the rich and their cronies, but so long as we have an undemocratic political system that allows one powerful individual to veto the will of the majority, these assaults on the working class will continue.
While Spanberger’s veto is undoubtedly a setback for workers, there is a solution, and you are a part of it. As working-class people who make society run, we must organize ourselves in our workplaces and unions to create a movement capable of standing up for our rights. These efforts must be merged with the socialist movement to wrest power from the two parties of the capitalist class and build a real democracy for all. History will look back on this act of cowardice with the disdain it deserves, but only if we continue the work of building a fighting independent labor movement brick by brick, and merge it with the broader struggle for democracy and socialism. In the words of A. Philip Randolph, whose National Brotherhood of Workers of America successfully organized African-American shipyard and dock workers in the Tidewater region of Virginia over a century ago, “Justice is never given; it is exacted, and the struggle must be continuous.”