Multiple Washington school districts recently reached tentative bargaining agreements, and an October 1 deadline looms for unionized state government employees to submit ratified contracts in time for consideration in the upcoming state budget cycle.
It’s a consequential deadline, as the wage and benefit contracts being negotiated constitute the majority of local and state government budgets, and reaching an agreement includes late nights at the bargaining table, worker rallies, walkouts, political pressure, threats of strikes, media coverage, and use of taxpayer dollars.
But in Washington, what the public rarely sees are the financial details under consideration.
Agreements are struck behind closed doors with taxpayer dollars, between government officials and the very unions whose dues often fund those officials' campaigns. There's something uncomfortable about a governor negotiating wages and benefits with one of their largest campaign supporters, with almost no public visibility into the process. And it's worth asking how that squares with a state that otherwise prides itself on open government.
Washington has one of the strongest Public Records Laws in the country, and the state's Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) is built on the principle that decisions made by elected officials should be open to scrutiny. But in 1990, the legislature carved out an exception for union grievance meetings, collective bargaining sessions, and related labor discussions.
And courts have since reinforced that decision.
In 2025, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that collective bargaining agreements are shielded from the Public Records Act until the legislature funds them and the governor signs the budget in May. Since agreements are submitted in October, neither the legislature nor the public sees all the terms of a deal until well after.
Open collective bargaining should be the default when government officials are negotiating public services and government salaries with taxpayer dollars. Especially when those dollars are already stretched thin.
Openness discourages backroom deals and undue influence, builds public trust in government, and lets the workers being represented see how their interests are actually handled, instead of piecing it together from competing narratives after the fact.
Transparency in collective bargaining is a reasonable and responsible policy.
However, government unions and their lobbyists couldn’t disagree more and have a history of fiercely opposing all attempts at lifting the veil, but the reality is that open bargaining is ongoing around the country without incident. In Idaho, for example, legislation unanimously passed over a decade ago assures public access to government employee labor negotiations.
While Idaho leads the way, the quest for contract transparency hasn’t been as successful in Washington despite public support.
When Washington’s cash-strapped Lincoln County adopted a Collective Bargaining Transparency Resolution in 2016, it was a response to a failed safety levy attempt. Commissioners sought to allow more citizen oversight to demonstrate that the costs of providing essential services were increasing at a faster rate than the revenues.
The local Teamsters pushed back and established their own resolution - that negotiations remain behind closed doors. After the Teamsters refused to come to the table, both sides filed and were found guilty of unfair labor practices. After five years of litigation, the Court of Appeals determined that OPMA didn’t prohibit open bargaining but also that neither party could unilaterally decide the matter.
Since the resolution, Lincoln County and all of its unions successfully bargained in public, and a subsequent safety levy was passed by a vote of the people,
A similar fight played out in the City of Spokane. In 2019, nearly 80 percent of voters approved a charter amendment requiring the city to publicly bargain with its unions. The union representing city workers sued to block it.
In that case, the State Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the state has "preempted the field" of collective bargaining - meaning cities and counties can't set their own rules, even with overwhelming voter support, because the Public Employees' Collective Bargaining Act (PECBA) intended one uniform process statewide.
A similar Spokane County ordinance met the same fate for the same reason. Under current law, whether to bargain in public or private is a "permissive" subject. Both sides of the bargaining table have to agree to open the doors.
In January 2023, the Spokane County Board of Commissioners adopted a transparency resolution encouraging, but not requiring, open negotiations, a step that signals goodwill without changing the legal landscape.
In Washington, union strongholds choke out a narrow path to enacting policies rooted in transparency. The courts have made clear that only the legislature can change these rules, and because unions carry significant weight in Olympia, meaningful reform faces steep odds.
But core questions of wages, benefits, and pensions arguably belong somewhere the public can watch, or at minimum be held before a neutral, non-partisan body that isn't politicking either side.
Workable policy solutions include building compensation decisions squarely into the normal legislative budget process, rather than finalizing them in closed-door sessions before lawmakers ever weigh in.
Until then, it may fall to the public, as the ultimate employer of every government worker, to keep pushing its elected officials for the essential transparency the law doesn't currently require.
Meg Goudy is Director of the Bill & Milly Kay Baldwin Center for Education at the Mountain States Policy Center, an independent research organization based in Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming. Online at mountainstatespolicy.org.
