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The rejected a resolution to launch the multi-year effort to add a “right-to-work” amendment to the state Constitution by an 8-7, party-line vote.

Voters rejected the same proposed constitutional amendment in 2016 by a vote of 54% to 46%.

“We’re going to be talking about this going into the elections this year,” said state Sen. Mark Obenshain, R-Rockingham, the proposal’s sponsor, after the committee action.

Passage of a state constitutional amendment is a multi-year process. The General Assembly must approve a proposed amendment in two different years with an election for the House of Delegates in between before the measure goes to voters in a statewide referendum.

Shortly before the committee vote, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears held a news conference calling for the resolution to go forward.

“In my very first State of the Commonwealth, I was very clear, if you send me any legislation that erodes or damages our right-to-work foundational laws, it will meet the end of my veto pen,” Youngkin said.

“I believe that it’s because, in fact, we have a Republican governor, that it has dissuaded my colleagues from across the aisle from doing what I think they fundamentally want to do, which is repeal right to work,” Youngkin said.

“And that’s why this is so important. That’s why it’s important, in my view, to continue to have a Republican governor. But on top of that, for us to enshrine this into our Constitution.”

Earle Sears said her presumptive Democratic opponent in the gubernatorial election, former Rep. Abigail Spanberger, sponsored legislation to overturn right-to-work laws. She referred to a measure that Rep. Bobby Scott, D-3rd, introduced that said workers who receive union-negotiated wages and benefits should pay fees to cover the cost of the union negotiations that secured them. Spanberger and 212 other Congressional Democrats co-sponsored the measure.

“This is not anti-union, it is pro-worker,” Earle-Sears said of the right-to-work proposal.

Brian Peyton, president of Teamsters Local 322 in Richmond, told the committee the measure was an anti-union bid.

“I find it is disingenuous to say that this is pro-worker,” he said, recalling comments from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that that the term right to work was a false slogan.

State Sen. Glenn Sturtevant, R-Chesterfield, said the way he read the resolution, it would protect workers’ rights to join a union but added, “I recognize that there’s a political aspect to this.”

Before calling the vote, Sen. Aaron Rouse, D-Virginia Beach, the committee chair, said legislators would do better to focus on raising minimum wage.

“As a member of a union myself,” he said, “unions are under attack. We see that from the new administration that’s coming in, we understand that throughout the nation, that unions are under attack.”