Virginia Lawmakers Push to Extend Unionization Rights to Campus Dining Workers

Two bills moving through the Virginia General Assembly would expand collective bargaining rights to public sector workers, but campus dining staff, custodial workers, and other college hospitality employees are carved out of both. Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) is pressing to close that gap before the session ends sine die on Saturday.

HB1263 and SB378 would grant most Virginia public employees the right to collectively bargain, continuing a shift that began with a 2020 law allowing individual localities to decide on collective bargaining for themselves. But the current bills explicitly exclude employees at state colleges, along with home health workers paid through Medicaid. Negotiations over whether to extend coverage to those groups were ongoing in closed-door meetings as of this week.

Surovell brought a personal frame to a recent town hall discussion on the issue. He described working in the dining hall preparing food at James Madison University in the early 1990s. "If I'd had a union," Surovell said, "I guarantee I would've been able to make more money and have better working conditions."

Advocates point to a recent case at Virginia State University as a concrete illustration of what the exclusion costs workers. Shortly before the holidays in December, agricultural researcher Harbans Bhardwaj walked into a meeting with VSU leadership expecting to discuss a departmental reorganization. Instead, Bhardwaj, a tenured faculty member with over three decades of experience at the Petersburg university, was told it was his last day. He was presented with severance documents and informed that if he did not sign them on the spot, he would be denied severance entirely.

Ian Mullins, with the University of Virginia chapter of United Campus Workers, addressed a February press conference calling for the reinstatement of Bhardwaj and other VSU faculty. "With a union, this would not happen," Mullins said. "We would be able to defend ourselves."

Collective bargaining agreements can establish what advocates describe as an arbitration grievance system: a process involving a neutral third party to determine whether procedures were followed or academic freedom was violated. "If you look at a school which has had a long-term collective bargaining relationship, you'll see very rich kinds of protections," Herbert told VPM News. "It's about creating a process of democracy in the workplace."

Tony Hedgepeth, a member of SEIU Virginia 512, was among those who turned out for a press conference on collective bargaining at the Virginia State Capitol on January 23.

Virginia is not alone in wrestling with coverage gaps. Nevada extended bargaining rights to state employees in 2019 after local government workers had held those rights for decades. Colorado added limited rights for some state employees in 2020 and some county employees in 2022, and Denver voters approved a local ballot initiative in 2024 that led to a full municipal collective bargaining ordinance. In Colorado, university regents are now weighing a proposal to extend those rights to faculty and staff across the state's public universities. New Mexico overhauled its public-sector bargaining statute in 2020, restructuring its labor board system to address uneven enforcement.

Whether Virginia's session closes with campus dining and custodial workers inside or outside the bargaining tent depends on what emerges from those closed-door negotiations before adjournment.