The Virginia Worker

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Retired Organizing Director of ATU and UE Chris Townsend offers this analysis on the Youngkin Administration’s attack on Virginia labor history through the Department of Education curriculum and the response from the Virginia AFL-CIO

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The short-lived flap regarding Virginia Republican Govenor Glenn Youngkin’s intention to purge from the
public school curriculum even the current tiny mention of the labor movement – and its role in Virginia’s
state history – has come, and gone.

The State Board of Education was discovered making the changes by the Virginia Education Association (NEA), Virginia’s largest union of school teachers. See some of the reporting here: ‘We need to learn from history’: Va. workers ask state to not erase labor history (nbc12.com)

Leaders of NEA and the Virginia AFL-CIO made some justified noise about this shameful scheme to further liquidate the labor movement in Virginia, a state already hovering near the bottom of union density with a bare 3.7% of the workforce belonging to a union in 2022.

The news reports in April were short, few people likely saw them, and the issue has apparently been resolved to the satisfaction of Youngkin and his bigoted anti-labor administration. But given that NEA and the state AFL-CIO raised the issue, the web site of the state AFL-CIO said nothing about it, and NEA did mention the uproar but in a small and fragmented way.

Anyone interested in the scrap has apparently been left to guess as to the exact outcome. A further glance at the web sites of those two labor organizations reveals that they do not include any reference to labor history in Virginia or elsewhere. A Collective Voice for Our Students – VEA Website (veanea.org) and Virginia AFL-CIO (va-aflcio.org) These facts beg the question of why one significant Virginia labor union and the state’s labor
federation tried to make a major public issue about this state action when they apparently do little themselves to promote any understanding of our labor and worker history.

UNIONS BARELY EXIST IN VIRGINIA

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this episode was the fact that the state of Virginia had allowed for
any mention of the labor movement in the public school curriculum in the first place. Now even the tiny
reference to the positive aspects of unions and labor in Virginia’s history has presumably been eliminated and expunged.

That won’t surprise anyone who lives here, since those paying attention were already well aware that in Virginia, labor unions are still defacto banned, forced into a barely legal existence in this state. There is a simple reason why the labor movement in Virginia is so tiny; employers – including most public employers – systematically crush efforts by workers to organize and join unions in this state. And for many decades Virginia lawmakers sat on the sidelines and mostly did nothing while organized labor was liquidated where it existed and was prevented from becoming established in the state anywhere workers tried to organize.

Repression of worker rights in the Virginia private sector is well known; and until 2019 collective
bargaining in the Virginia public sector was banned. Not just absent from the protection of law, but expressly banned. In 2019 the state legislature – pushed at that time by several progressive Democrats – lifted the union ban for local and school district employees, although in every case the local jurisdiction would still only face a union if they voluntarily agreed to deal with a union.

The 2019 legislation did not address the ban on unions for state employees, so in Virginia we still have the distinction of living and paying taxes to a state that outright bans unions for workers in the state sector. Our federal government propaganda machinery likes to run around planet earth decrying the lack of trade union rights in other countries, while they conveniently ignore retrograde and repressive situations like ours here in the Old Dominion.

GOOD LABOR NEWS UNREPORTED AS WELL

The partial lifting of the ban on unions in the local government and school district workplaces has
generated some significant new union organizing in this state, although one would be hard-pressed to
discover where exactly this would be happening, or how many workers and unions are involved.

The Virginia AFL-CIO web site contains no mention of this good news. Perhaps so habituated to defeat and irrelevance that the state’s leading labor body may not even realize the small but significant movement shaping up among some of the public sector workforce. The winning of union elections and the nominal recognition that comes with it still only entitles the union to try to bargain a union contract with that employer on a completely voluntary basis, but it is still good news. Progress is progress, and several unions such as NEA, AFT, SEIU, ATU, CWA, and the Teamsters have begun to recruit local, county, and school district public employees.

By all indications several thousand public sector workers have actually joined unions in the past 18 months, but again the labor movement seems incapable of advertising this accomplishment. If only for a morale boost it would be welcomed news to the labor union members in Virginia, and likewise for the millions of union supporters who reside here.

UNIONS FAIL TO TELL THE STORY

Labor’s inability and unwillingness to tell our own story is nothing new. Although unions in Virginia enroll several hundred thousand members there is virtually no written history available from the unions for members or working people curious about the role of unions in this state. (If I have over-stepped here and anyone is aware of any written articles, books, or web postings to the contrary please make me aware of them) And while the labor movement as a whole does little to nothing in this regard, only a handful of individual unions even take the time to try to teach their membership any of their own union history.

Most union members know nothing about the foundation of their union, its history as it grew and evolved, it battles, successes, or losses. An internet search sometimes can yield some background and history about an individual union, but just as often those pieces are generated by anti-labor elements or are so fragmentary and disjointed to be of little value. Is it any wonder then that the general public is ignorant of unions, our contributions, our key role in the economic and political life of the state and country? Today’s labor leadership largely inherits this deplorable situation, and sadly most apparently do not even recognize it as a problem.

The Youngkin episode also begs the question of why the labor movement relies on such an unreliable agent as the
public schools in Virginia to tell even a part of our story. Whatever they might have done was at least something, and we should commend the VEA and the AFL-CIO for speaking up on this issue, but if it ends there the battle has been lost.

The labor movement in Virginia has a long and rich history, with almost every union garrison that exists today having been organized against tremendous odds. Furious and illegal employer resistance is the norm facing any union that tries to organize and enroll new groups in Virginia. And sadly, tragically, that heroic legacy of working people challenging and overcoming those
forces is unknown, untold, and therefore lost and forgotten.

WHERE TO FIND SOME USEFUL LABOR HISTORY

Useful labor and working-class history is available, although unless it is promoted worker-to-worker
there is little chance that working people here would ever discover it on their own. With the unions
doing almost nothing, and likely not going to address it, this again becomes one of the responsibilities of
the activists and leftists both in and outside the established unions.

For starters, Labor’s Untold Story is one bit of required book-length reading for those seeking an introduction to the history of the labor movement in the U.S. One of the very few labor history books produced by a union, it is available at: Labor’s Untold Story | UE (ueunion.org) For those inclined to take a major dip into our nation’s labor history, the landmark 11 volume History of the Labor Movement in the United States is a must-have.
Available from International Publishers, International Publishers (intpubnyc.com) this awesome series is
best taken one volume at a time, starting with Volume 1. History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 1 (intpubnyc.com)

There are other labor histories available that detail both broad developments, individual battles,
personalities, and struggles by working people and their unions of all kinds. Reader poll: what written labor history – articles and books – have you found, read, and think useful in your growth and development as a trade unionist in Virginia? E-mail me your suggestions at the e-mail below.

Anyone likewise interested in labor union education, classes, union history, also contact me at my e-mail below. There are some lessons for all of us here. While the Youngkin labor history flap is of note, it is a far
more critical point to be made that the organized labor movement in Virginia has the obligation to seriously promote labor history and education, but currently fails to do so. Why? What are they doing, the unions themselves, to teach and lead their own membership and more broad working class in this state as to the beneficial roles played by trade unions? Take action yourself: obtain and distribute the labor literature that is available, and insist that your own union leadership make significant efforts to begin to promote the history of their own union in Virginia, and the overall labor movement more broadly.