How Gov. Spanberger Betrayed Virginia's Workers by Harold Meyerson

[justaprogressive]

Exactly one year and six days ago, the Prospect posted a piece I’d just written about Colorado’s Jared Polis, under the headline “The Democrats’ One and Only Union-Busting Governor.”

As of a couple weeks ago, that headline is no longer accurate. Polis is still a union-buster and even more out of sync with Colorado Democrats, who’ve just formally censured him for complying with President Trump’s demand to commute the sentence of Tina Peters, the county clerk who’d been convicted for enabling a Trump acolyte to illegally access and copy the hard drives from her county’s voting machines in an effort to prove that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.

But Polis no longer holds that “one and only” status when it comes to Democratic governors who bust unions. Two weeks ago, Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger did just that by vetoing a bill that would have given Virginia’s public-sector workers the right to bargain collectively.

The parallels with Polis are almost uncanny. In Colorado, every Democrat in each house of the legislature had voted for a bill that would have ended the state’s somewhat anomalous “right-to-work” status. (Colorado’s law, dating from 1943, says that once a union wins majority support in a recognition election, it then has to win 75 percent support in a second election to be permitted to collect dues from members.) Every Republican voted against. Siding with the Republicans, Polis vetoed the bill.

https://prospect.org/2026/05/25/how-gov-spanberger-betrayed-virginias-workers/