This morning it was announced that the Virginia Education Union, a joint coalition of Virginia-based local chapters of the AFT and NEA, has won a historic union election to represent over 27,000 teachers and school employees in Fairfax County, Virginia.
97% of all teachers voted to unionize and 81% of all support staff voted to unionize, a 9-to-1 margin in favor of unionization.
“Today marks the culmination of a 47-year fight to win collective bargaining in Fairfax County Public Schools. Our movement was successful because we all took control of our own lives,” David Walrod said in a statement.
The union victory in the ninth-largest school district is one of the biggest teachers union elections in decades, and it has the potential to dramatically change politics in Northern Virginia.
“I think people realize they're not being respected and they want to achieve the American dream,” said Leslie Houston, president of the Fairfax Education Association.
Fairfax County, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C., is the fifth-richest county in the U.S. But most public servants say they can no longer afford to live in the communities where they teach. That's what's motivated many to get involved, especially since the pandemic.
“Every educator should have the right to live where they work, and every educator should be able to live on their salary and not have to take on a second job by 2024,” Houston said.
(Listen to the full interview with Leslie Houston here)
The union election is the result of decades of organizing. For decades, Virginia banned collective bargaining for public employees.
However, as Virginia began to lean more Democratic, labor unions began to exert greater pressure on Virginia's Democratic Party to grant collective bargaining rights.
In 2020, former Virginia Democratic Governor Ralph Norum signed a bill allowing Virginia local governments to grant collective bargaining rights to public employees. Since then, tens of thousands of public employees across Virginia have joined the labor movement, making the state the fastest growing labor union in the country.
“We've been working toward this goal for years. We've been working to establish a Democratic legislature in Virginia since Gov. Ralph Northam was elected in 2017,” said David Walrod, president of the Fairfax County Coalition of Educators. “In 2019, we spent a lot of time lobbying to get a collective bargaining bill passed, and then once the bill went into effect in May 2021, we had to work with the school board to try to get a resolution passed and get them to approve collective bargaining.”
He said the union has had to work overtime to educate Virginians about their collective bargaining rights.
“For 50 years we weren't allowed to collectively bargain. So you have people who come to our state, grow up, go to public schools, graduate, get their degrees, spend their whole lives as teachers and then retire. And all that time, collective bargaining wasn't legal. So what we're trying to do now is make sure people know that Virginia is a collective bargaining state,” Walrod said.
Walrod believes cooperation between unions was key to the historic trade union elections there.
In a show of solidarity, the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the AFT, and the Virginia Education Association, an affiliate of the NEA, decided to work together, rather than compete with each other, to form a unified union for all teachers and school employees.
“We are stronger together. We are stronger when we're all pulling in the same direction. We are stronger when we're operating with a collective voice. So the idea that we can give 27,000 people a voice that they didn't have before is definitely a very powerful feeling,” Walrod says.
Now the union says it will target other schools across Virginia, particularly in the Democratic suburbs of Washington in Northern Virginia, once a bastion of anti-unionism. (Walrod says his union is literally just over a mile from the headquarters of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.)
The union feels this historic victory will encourage other workers in Virginia’s rapidly unionizing public sector to organize.
“We really hope it will have a ripple effect elsewhere,” Walrod said.
Post-pandemic, Fairfax Education Association President Leslie Houston said many teachers would be open to it. Controversy over COVID-19 school closures and attempts to ban books has led many parents to turn on teachers in Virginia's affluent suburban Fairfax County.
“I remember that first month, I felt so loved by my teachers. [of the pandemic] “Until people found out they couldn't go back to school this year, and then when Fairfax County Schools decided they weren't going to go back until there was a vaccine, we became the bad guys,” Houston said.
Now teachers say they have more support now that they're unionized.
Currently, public sector unions are expanding in Virginia, and the unions are run by Democratic allies, which will likely strengthen the Democratic Party in Virginia.
“I hope the reason state politics is changing is because people are starting to realize they're righting wrongs,” Leslie Houston said.
Payday will report more on this historic trade union election in due course.
Listen to the full 24-minute interview with Fairfax Education Association President Leslie Houston.
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