Tue, 04/20/2021
On April 17, Alexandria City Council unanimously passed an ordinance authorizing collective bargaining with City employees, becoming the first municipality in Virginia to do so. Attorneys from McGillivary Steele Elkin LLP assisted IAFF Local 2141 in organizing and advocating for a comprehensive collective bargaining ordinance, meeting frequently with City representatives and officials to ensure that the final ordinance provides comprehensive, fair collective bargaining rights to the City’s employees.
Last year, the Virginia General Assembly passed a statute permitting municipalities to engage in collective bargaining with their employees but only if the municipality first passed an ordinance authorizing the bargaining. The new state law goes into effect on May 1, 2021. Until the new statute, collective bargaining for municipal employees in Virginia had been illegal since a Virginia Supreme Court decision in 1977.
Under the new state law, the bargaining rights afforded to municipal employees are determined by the locality. The Alexandria ordinance provides the City’s employees with the broad right to negotiate over wages, benefits, and other conditions of employment. The ordinance also allows for the City’s labor organizations and the City to jointly appoint a Labor Relations Administrator to oversee representation elections and hear disputes between the parties under the ordinance. The ordinance creates a procedure to resolve bargaining impasses between a union and the City with any unresolved impasses being decided by the City Council after a factfinding decision by a neutral.
The City’s labor organizations, including IAFF Local 2141, were influential in getting the City Council to adopt the collective bargaining ordinance. As part of the process, the City’s fire fighters, along with other labor organizations, lobbied the City to ensure that the ordinance passed was fair and provided true bargaining rights to the City’s employees. The labor organizations were able to successfully broaden the scope of collective bargaining, ensure that entry-level employees are covered by collective bargaining agreements, and create a fair process to resolve impasses.
Beginning next month, labor organizations representing the City’s employees can file petitions to be certified as the exclusive representative of specified bargaining units of City employees. Following an election, the labor organizations will be able to negotiate comprehensive contracts with the City covering wages, benefits, and conditions of employment.
The ordinance in an enormous victory not just for Alexandria workers but for municipal workers across the Commonwealth. While Virginia municipal employees have long been subject to inequitable and arbitrary treatment by employers, the employees in Alexandria, and soon elsewhere, will now have the ability to negotiate for better, more equitable working conditions. This will lead to more effective municipal services and employees who are more likely to have both higher morale and higher retention rates. This will benefit not only the employees but also the residents of Alexandria.
