As our election approaches, the status of Virginia workers’ rights hangs in the balance.
Virginia voters will make a choice that could preserve — or destroy — the ability of workers to decide freely whether to join and pay dues to a union.
Since 1947, Virginia workers have enjoyed right-to-work protections, which means they have the freedom to join or support a union in their workplaces — or refrain from both.
But some commonwealth politicians have expressed that vague reforms of Virginia’s right-to-work law “may be necessary” or that the law should be done away with completely. That would return Virginia to a system that lets unions force workers to pay up or be fired.
Virginians by and large don’t agree with this vision. Surveys show time and time again that up to 89% of Virginians oppose requiring anyone to pay union dues just to get or keep a job.
I teach employment law at Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach, but you don’t need to be a law professor to recognize that forcing someone to fund a private organization they don’t like is wrong.
But my support for right-to-work runs even deeper because, in my nearly 50 years with the Virginia-based National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, I’ve witnessed the egregious measures unions often take to compel workers.
I’ve defended workers nationwide from union bosses who demand dues payments despite sincere religious objections to union support. Such demands violate federal antidiscrimination law.
Dorothy Frame, a former Army hospital employee, sought my assistance in 2021 after Laborers’ International Union officials at her workplace rejected her request that they accommodate her religious beliefs.
They outrageously tried to “explain” to both Dorothy — and her parish priest — why Frame’s Catholic-based concerns about the union’s support for pro-choice political organizations were incorrect and that the union still deserved her money.
“It crushed me, it hurt me so deeply,” Frame said of her experience. “Not just for them to say that to me, but to tell my priest that.”
Frame won her case in 2022, but only after litigation.
More recently, in 2023, I litigated a case for Josiah Leonatti, a teenage supermarket cashier whom United Food and Commercial Workers union officials subjected to an Orwellian “religion test” he supposedly needed to take if he wanted his religious objection to union dues payment recognized. Federal antidiscrimination law does not permit religious tests.
As these cases and many others I’ve taken on for Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims and a Wiccan demonstrate, deciding whether to pay union dues is much more than just a cost-benefit analysis for many workers: It’s an issue that concerns their most cherished beliefs.
It’s been an honor to help these workers, but their struggles make one thing abundantly clear: Why should unions have the power to force workers to pay dues in the first place?
Even religious objectors must jump through hoops to seek accommodation, and many others don’t even have that recourse.
The beauty of Virginia’s right-to-work law is that it puts the power back in the hands of individual workers — not union bosses — to decide whether to affiliate or disaffiliate with a union.
That means that workers can join or support a union if they wish but can just as easily refrain from doing so for religious, political, financial or any other reason.
In America, we pride ourselves on protecting individuals’ freedom to associate, and that freedom should apply just as much at work as it does anywhere else.
Virginians should remember that when they head to the polls this November and ask their candidates to pledge to defend Virginia’s right-to-work law.
Bruce N. Cameron of Virginia Beach is the Reed Larson Professor of Labor Law at Regent University School of Law. The opinions here are his own and not those of the university.
