Longtime labor union goal of collective bargaining for state workers draws emotional testimony
A longstanding goal of Nevada labor organizations to allow an estimated 20,000 state government employees to collectively bargain came before lawmakers for the first time Thursday, the initial step for a bill with its best chance at passage in three decades.
Lawmakers on the Senate Government Affairs Committee held an evening hearing on the much-anticipated SB135, which would lay out the structure and framework for nearly a dozen categories of state workers to join a union and collectively bargain with state government.
The bill is sponsored by Democratic Sen. David Parks, but was presented and strongly supported by members of the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees, the nation’s largest labor organization for public employees. Steve Kreisberg, the union’s Director of Research and Collective Bargaining, told lawmakers that the bill would extend the same rights to join a union and collectively bargain offered to local government and private-sector workers.
“By adopting such a bill, you’re really expressing trust in your workforce, to make what they believe is the correct decision for themselves,” he said. “And you’re trusting in that workforce to exercise the rights that they believe they should exercise, as opposed to policy makers exercising that right for them.”
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