VA: Loudoun County Supervisors Approve Collective Bargaining For Public Employees: Safe Work Sites

- NPR, WAMU, Dec. 9, 2021.

Public employees in Loudoun County will soon be able to collectively bargain for wages, benefits, and working conditions, after the Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to approve an ordinance allowing it. The ordinance passed the board 6-2-1, with one supervisor absent. It will create three different bargaining units to represent fire and rescue, county government, and labor and trades employees.

The new labor rights could impact as many as 3,000 county employees, including firefighters, various administrative office staff, maintenance workers, and more, according to David Broder, the President of SEIU Virginia 512, a labor union that represents public service employees and home health workers in Virginia.

"This will ensure that employees can bargain over the full range of pay, benefits and working conditions," he says. "That's so important during a pandemic, to ensure that workers can bargain for PPE, for clean work sites, for safe workplace policies."

The county's ordinance has been a long time coming. The Board first requested its staff begin developing a framework for collective bargaining in April, and has been working on the issue ever since, taking multiple votes and hearing from the public in the months following...

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https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/12/09/1062659459/loudoun-county-supervisors-approve-collective-bargaining-for-public-employees