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.

Jamea Nelson, a county mental health worker, was one of several SEIU employees who offered public comment to the Board. She sees collective bargaining as a way to ensure workers’ representation and to recognize the value of their work.

“Every day, I work with a range of individuals who come to Loudoun County Mental Health with severe mental health and substance abuse obstacles,” Nelson said. “No matter what the circumstance, we step up and support these individuals, despite our current staffing crisis.”

Even after months of work, the Board of Supervisors still faced a few final decisions in the approval vote. Those will include how many individual bargaining units of different types of county staff to create, whether to have an independent third party administer the collective bargaining process for the county, and clarifying what happens if there’s an impasse between management and unions.

Bargaining units are meant to represent “communities of interest” — workers with similar experiences as needs who can be represented collectively. County staff recommended that the county set up four units: fire and rescue, labor and trades, professionals and specialists, and administrative and other support services. Broder and SEIU Virginia 512, in contrast, pushed for a smaller number of units, proposing simply fire and rescue and general government.

“I think workers in Loudoun County have been very clear that they want to have a united, strong voice on the job, and that means two units,” Broder said.

The new ordinance sits in between the two demands, creating three units, but establishing a labor relations administrator, fact-finding, and several other measures to resolve negotiations.

SEIU Virginia 512 celebrated the ordinance as a victory.

“Tonight, the essential workers of Loudoun County made history,” said chapter chair Julius Reynolds in a press release. “It’s just the beginning — the first page of a new chapter.”

Loudoun County follows Arlington and Fairfax counties and the city of Alexandria, which all established collective bargaining rights for government employees earlier this year.

This spring, the General Assembly amended Virginia law to allow localities to choose to enable employees to bargain through union representatives — a significant shift away from the state’s decades-long right-to-work history.

Prior to legislative action on public employee collective bargaining and a number of other labor rights provisions, Oxfam ranked Virginia as the “worst state for workers.” It now has jumped up to No. 23.

Colleen Grablick contributed reporting.