A Historic Opportunity Betrayed: How Spanberger Sold Out Southern Workers

Gov. Abigail Spanberger represents a breed of corporate Democrats still taking workers’ votes for granted.

By Carl Cunningham

If you grew up in the Southern labor movement like I did, you know what it means to fight uphill. You know how hard it is to organize workers in states where the law was deliberately written to keep wages low and unions weak.

In the South, the labor movement was never large. But it was tight. A handful of true believers. The same faces at every rally. The same worn, wood-paneled union halls filled with folding chairs. The smell of coffee and cigarette smoke. Old-timers telling stories about strikes from 30 years ago. Business agents who knew every member by name. Organizers who drove hundreds of miles down two-lane highways to meet workers in church basements, Waffle Houses, and truck stops.

The labor movement is always David versus Goliath. But in the South, the odds felt even steeper — a small army of organizers, local leaders, and rank-and-file members taking on corporations, politicians, and a legal system rigged against working people.

We didn’t have the numbers, but we had conviction. We believed Southern workers deserved the same wages and protections as workers anywhere else in America.

Our fight has lasted generations. Which is why what happened in Virginia last week is so infuriating.

For the first time in decades, Virginia had a chance to strike a real blow against one of the most destructive anti-worker laws in American history. The General Assembly passed legislation to repeal Virginia’s public-sector “right to work” law. Then Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger vetoed it. She had an opportunity to stand with workers. Instead, she sided with the same failed ideology that has kept Southern wages depressed and unions on the defensive for nearly 80 years. Spanberger’s party affiliation makes the betrayal even worse. Aren’t union members consistently told — or even scolded — that it’s the Democratic Party alone that stands with us?

I say this as a proud lifelong Democrat.

It’s true that the Democratic Party has historically been on the right side of labor, especially compared to Republicans and especially in the South. And for generations, Southern unions poured its most precious resources — money and manpower — into electing Democrats. Union members knocked on doors in the heat. They made phone calls after shifts and donated the money they could spare to their campaigns. They trusted that when the moment came, Democrats would stand with them and, one day, repeal the anti-worker laws created by pro-business Republicans.

“Right to work” is one of the most dishonest phrases in American politics. It has nothing to do with worker freedom. It was designed to weaken unions by allowing employees to receive all the benefits of a union contract without contributing to the union that negotiates and enforces it.

In other words, it legalizes freeloading. Its purpose is to divide workers and drain unions of the resources they need to fight. For decades, Southern Republicans used “right to work” to market our region as a low-wage bargain for Corporate America.

Come here, they said, labor is cheap and unions are weak. And corporations did exactly that. Since the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, companies took advantage of “right to work” laws by moving their nonunion operations to places like Florida, Texas, and my home state of Georgia.

Executives got rich and workers got screwed. But the Southern labor movement never stopped fighting. After decades of struggle, the tide finally started to turn. Unions were popular again, and the South was no longer the exception. All we needed was for elected officials to do their part.

Virginia could have been the first domino. The first Southern state to dismantle one of the most powerful anti-union weapons ever devised. Spanberger had that chance. She blew it.

Spanberger represents a breed of corporate Democrats who ask workers for their votes but balk when asked to challenge the very laws that hold them back. We can’t keep getting fooled by them. When Abigail Spanberger ran for governor of Virginia, she made herself an outlier among Democrats by openly opposing the repeal of “right to work.” Too often, labor is expected to ignore these red flags in the name of party unity and the assumption that candidates will remember who got them elected.

That’s why this one hurts. Because so many of us still held out hope that the governor would understand the importance of this moment — or maybe, just maybe, she would remember the hardworking Virginians who put her into office.

I still believe the Democratic Party is the best vehicle for advancing workers’ rights in this country. But Democrats like Spanberger take labor’s trust for granted. And when that trust is broken, workers do not forget — especially in the South. Because if we’re sticking with the biblical metaphors, her veto was a Judas-level betrayal. Not just of policy, but of history.