Fairfax County Approves Measure Setting Up Process For Collective Bargaining

FAIRFAX COUNTY, VA — The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance Tuesday granting county workers collective bargaining powers.

The ordinance passed the board in a 9-1 vote, with the only Republican on the board, Springfield District Supervisor Pat Herrity, opposing the measure.

The Virginia General Assembly passed legislation in 2020 that allowed counties, cities and towns to adopt collective bargaining ordinances.

After the vote at Tuesday's meeting, Fairfax County Board Chairman Jeff McKay said in a tweet that collective bargaining “will improve our employee retention and make our services better.”

The ordinance affects Fairfax County's general county employees, firefighters, police and other first responders. It does not apply to employees of Fairfax County Public Schools, which is expected to establish its own framework for collective bargaining.

It establishes a framework for negotiations over wages, benefits, working conditions, hours worked and policies and practices affecting county employees. The discussions would take place between July 1 and Oct. 15 of a given year.

The process would be overseen by a neutral “labor relations administrator,” whose duties would include conducting elections to certify or decertify a bargaining unit and to resolve labor-management disputes.

If the parties cannot reach an agreement, the discussions would go into mediation and, then, enter into binding arbitration.

SEIU Virginia 512 President David Broder praised the passage of the ordinance.

"The passage of collective bargaining is the result of working people organizing against all odds for years," Broder said in a tweet Tuesday night. "The door to a Fairfax that works for everyone opens wider tonight as workers win a real seat at the bargaining table."

Broder said SEIU is going to keep working to "ensure that every Virginian has the right to join a union and collectively bargain."

At Tuesday's meeting, McKay noted that several unions were included in the process of drafting the collective bargaining ordinance and that no unions were left out.

McKay also emphasized that what the board approved is a collective bargaining ordinance, not a collective bargaining agreement. "Approving this ordinance allows us to go the next step to work on and establish a collective bargaining agreement, something I know our employees have been asking for for a very long time," he said.

Herrity explained that he opposes collective bargaining for public sector employees because he believes it is bad for the citizens of a jurisdiction and the employees themselves. The supervisor does not agree that collective bargaining will help the county retain employees.

“I actually think this agreement is going to hurt our ability to be flexible and offer things like signing bonuses where we need to and offer things like employee referral bonuses because it’s going to restrict us to collective bargaining and, of course, everybody has to be treated pretty equally in collective bargaining and signing bonuses tend not to fit into those real easily," Herrity said.