The following oped is by the retired UE Political Action Director Chris Townsend, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia. It offers crucial lessons for organized labor.

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA - The recent political uproar in Virginia has come and gone, where newly elected Democrat Governor Abigail Spanberger spit in the face of the labor movement.  On May 14, Spanberger’s veto killed a decades overdue piece of legislation, passed overwhelmingly by the state legislature, to legalize and modernize the labor rights of Virginia public workers.

For almost 80 years, since the Congressional passage of the notorious anti-union Taft-Hartley law in 1948, Virginia state law has also banned collective bargaining for its public-sector workers. It took until  2020 for that retrograde ban to be partially lifted, granting local and school district employees the right to unionize, but only in political jurisdictions where public employers voluntarily allow it. While many have organized as a result, the vast majority of Virginia’s 500,000 public sector workers remain unorganized.

These major anti-union blows were celebrated by  Spanberger’s corporate supporters and the statewide MAGA crowd—and they still despise her.  Among the conservative Democrat leadership who abound in Virginia, and among the corporate Democrats, there is similar relief that “Big Labor” has been turned away yet again.

I have lived in Alexandria, Virginia, for nearly 35 years. For that entire time, I have been an active trade union leader, having organized several thousand workers in this state and led union members in every imaginable local, state, and national political fight.  Elected Democrats here, even under the best circumstances, have been only occasional allies for labor.  Some new supportive Democrats have emerged in the past decade, but this Spanberger episode is a stark reminder that in this state, organized labor is far from being accepted as part of the political fabric. The current Republican Party machinery would happily ban us all. Maybe even do something worse. The Democratic Party machinery wants our money and our votes—both considerable—but is determined to deliver as little as possible in return. The Spanberger veto reminds us of the sad history of captivity that organized labor has lived with for many decades.

A few observations from my many years in the Virginia labor movement and this recent struggle will help readers to make sense of this shameful and bigoted conduct by our Governor, Abigail Spanberger.

Labor Adversary from the Start

Spanberger was recruited to run first for Congress, then for Governor, by the same anti-union Democratic Party machinery that has helped keep the trade union density in Virginia at less than 5%. Yes, not a typo. Less than 5%.

Her attractiveness to them was her role as a CIA agent, her total lack of any political experience, and her gender, which increases her electability. Nothing else. Her loyalty is to these political handlers, period.

The Virginia Democratic Party movers and fixers have bet on Abigail Spanberger as the best possible candidate to follow either Senator Tim Kaine, or Mark Warner, whichever seat comes open first. She is limited to one term as Gov, and in just a couple of years, they will place her on their Senatorial ticket.

Her CIA background is quite contemptible, alarming, and should automatically exclude her from Democratic politics. But in today’s Democratic Party, these are “national security credentials” which guarantee her support for worldwide U.S. intelligence and military operations. Particularly for Virginia’s large defense employers, who prize the unimpeded and unquestioned flow of trillions of dollars in taxpayer money into these bankrupting and criminal adventures.

So, her one and only term as Virginia Governor is merely an audition to move up and serve the monstrous military-intelligence state apparatus as a Senator.

Consider that she joined the CIA eagerly and voluntarily at the height of George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, launched - as readers may recall - on the big lie that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. I have no problem concluding that this is evidence that she was, in fact, a Republican. Just a pre-MAGA Republican, as if that was acceptable.

Right up to the current moment, she has refused to provide any details as to what motivated her to join the CIA or what she did during her 12 years in that organization. Let’s recall the breathtaking crimes of the CIA, its systematic support for repressive regimes across the globe, and its unprosecuted illegal activities here inside the U.S., among other things.

It is worth mentioning that the CIA’s support for numerous repressive regimes also has included mass and deadly destruction of many labor and union movements abroad. Not in support of them. How many individual trade union leaders have been murdered by CIA-sponsored death squads across the globe? Answer: too many to count. Only recently have journalists like Vincent Bevins tried to uncover the full history of CIA-backed Cold War political genocides, finding a death toll in the millions.

In 2020, while holding her Congressional seat in Virginia, Spanberger was heard on a taped conference call blaming her political troubles on “socialists” and “socialism”. She was, of course, referring to the progressive and pro-union wing of the Democratic Party.

Once selected by the Virginia Democratic Party establishment to run for Governor in 2025, her campaign dutifully avoided most critical issues. She drew a lucky straw and was able to run against a lunatic fringe MAGA Republican candidate, virtually ensuring her eventual success in an increasingly purple Virginia.

She won easily on a watered-down “affordability” platform that offered very few specific proposals. Certainly, no bold pro-worker or labor proposals were offered in this tepid brew of pro-good- things-and-anti-bad-things provided by Democratic Party pollsters and operatives.

In August of 2025, the Virginia State AFL-CIO Convention refused – to its credit - to endorse her gubernatorial bid, with certain vocal unions outraged that she refused to even discuss any repeal of the so-called “Right-to-Work” law.  This racist and bigoted law has hung around the necks of Virginia working people just as long as the ban on collective bargaining for the public sector workforce.

This led to a typical Virginia situation where the scattered unions made private deals with Spanberger as best they could, if they could. The state AFL-CIO played its usual slumbering and near-invisible role.

Whisked handily into office on the anti-Trump wave of November 2025, Spanberger faced no pressure to deliver on any promises to labor unions. She faces no re-election campaign as Governor, and virtually every union in the state will reflexively support her eventual run for Senate.

A Predictable Betrayal

As the 2026 session of the Virginia General Assembly ground on, the public sector collective bargaining bill was spotted by longtime labor activists as a problem with Spanberger from the beginning to the end.  Her final veto of the legislation, which would have righted numerous historic wrongs against labor, seemed destined to pass only in the minds of labor leaders who apparently took little stock of her real history and political makeup.

In 2025, I published an article on Spanberger’s election just several weeks after her victory, in which I challenged self-styled leftist journalists for exalting her win rather than examining the problems she posed to the working people of Virginia. See:

I pointed out that Governor Spanberger possessed nothing in her own background which should incline anyone, least of all anyone in the labor movement, to believe that she was likely to support, let alone promote, the kind of labor rights legislation which she ultimately vetoed.

Once Spanberger made it clear that she was going to veto the legislation, the labor movement responded with nothing more than an insiders’ political campaign. There were never any mobilizations of the union membership, let alone the broad working class, or of supporting Democratic lawmakers. A few letters were released, some outrage was offered, several press conferences were held, and that was it.

Popgun Lobbying

In a desperate last-minute insider move, several unions hired an out-of-state publicist to create overnight a new lobby group, the “Virginia Public Sector Labor Coalition”.  While several unions were enrolled, many were left out. Both unions in this state which I have belonged to, and worked for, were apparently not contacted. Although I am as active as any unionist in this state, I was never contacted once by any union machinery in motion to try to block Spanberger’s veto move. My wife, a member of one of the signatory unions, was sent several last-minute emails. Nothing else. Both of us were left to call and email around to try to figure out what we could do.

We obviously concluded that this was not an effective political action program. Not at all. In the end, it was just a high-priced political ass-covering project by union leaders and their professional staff who had played into the hands of Spanberger.

The always hapless Virginia AFL-CIO issued a press release the day after Spanberger’s veto, lambasting it as a “devastating betrayal”. Vowing that “Virginia workers will not forget it.” And with that, the Federation dutifully put away its pop-gun.

Of course they will forget it. They always have and always will. Spanberger knows this too. So do the corporate forces who dominate the Virginia Democratic Party, and the unions who are hostage to this sort of “leadership”.

Squandered Opportunities

As the ashes of this political debacle cool, it must be said that the stars were lined up in the wake of Spanberger’s election to sweep away all manner of retrograde, racist, and bigoted anti-union history here in Virginia. This was the best moment in decades to overturn Right-to-Work, legalize and establish collective bargaining for the public sector, and maybe even mobilize sections of the Democratic Party to help expand the significant private and public sector organizing wave sweeping this state. Clearly as we have been witness to, trusting a CIA agent and corporate Democrat to move legislation of this importance is a childish proposition.

Perhaps in the 2027 session of the Virginia legislature, some progress can be made, but that is unlikely unless the insiders-only political mentality of labor’s political professionals is abandoned in favor of broad member mobilization.

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Chris Townsend is a 47-year union member and leader who lives in Virginia. He was most recently the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) International Union Organizing Director. Previously he was an International Representative and Political Action Director for the United Electrical Workers Union (UE), and he has held local positions in both the SEIU and UFCW. He may be reached at:cwtownsend52@gmail.com

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