BARRING A SUDDEN REVERSAL by their ostensibly pro-labor bosses, the Massachusetts legislative staffers who have long fought to form a union will once again need to wait ‘til next year.

House Democrats have quietly smothered legislation that would have given aides in both chambers a clear legal right to organize and collectively bargain. A similar bill is technically still alive in the Senate, but given that top lawmakers there have already voiced concerns about the legal framework for a staff union, the prospects appear dim.

As a result, legislative employees will likely ride out the remainder of 2026 in an unchanged position: facing a Senate hierarchy that argues current law does not allow staff to bargain collectively, and a Legislature that does not want to rewrite statute to make that possible.

“It’s disappointing. They are for labor, they speak about being pro-labor, and for whatever reason, they don’t see the need to continue or support the measure to allow the staffers to form a union,” said Julio De La Cruz, vice president of the IBEW Local 2222 union that’s working with House and Senate aides.

Organizers have been pushing legislation that would codify staffers’ right to organize. The bill idled before the Labor and Workforce Development Committee for months until March 19, when the committee’s co-chair, Rep. Paul McMurtry, wrote to IBEW organizers to share that it would not move forward.

“While the bill generated important discussions, there was ultimately not sufficient support for its advancement this session, and it has been referred to study,” McMurtry wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by CommonWealth Beacon. “Although this outcome is not what you had hoped for, the conversations sparked by this legislation have been meaningful and necessary. The role of legislative staff across the Commonwealth is critical, and their contributions to serving our constituents cannot be overstated.”

McMurtry’s office confirmed the correspondence and the bill’s status. The Dedham Democrat declined to answer follow-up questions about how he determined the bill did not have support or what his concerns were. House Speaker Ron Mariano also declined to comment.

Under newly adopted House rules, each committee has a limited window of time after a public hearing to decide the fate of each bill aired at that hearing. If too much time passes without action, the bills are automatically sent to dead-end studies without any need for a recorded vote. That’s what happened to the House version of the unionization bill, and the 11 representatives on the Labor Committee as a result avoided taking a public position on the topic.

Even some of McMurtry’s colleagues aren’t sure why the bill failed to gain traction. Rep. Rodney Elliott, who took over as the primary House supporter following the death of original sponsor Rep. Carol Doherty, said he hasn’t received any outreach from McMurtry or other committee members explaining the bill’s quiet demise — a contrast, he said, from other measures he’s backed that fell short.

“I wish there was a list of questions we could answer, but we really haven’t received any, as far as I know,” Elliott, a Lowell Democrat, said. “I’m not really sure what the issue is. If those concerns that members have can be brought forward, I’m sure there’s a willingness to compromise and be reasonable and put together a bill.”

At a hearing about the legislation in October, members of the Labor Committee asked virtually no questions of bill backers, and did not raise any concerns. Sen. Jake Oliveira, the committee’s other co-chair, recounted his own time working as a staffer and the “low salary” he endured at the time.

The Senate version of the legislation is technically still alive. Senators on the same committee moved to give themselves until July 31 — the last day for major new business in the 2025-2026 term — to decide its fate.

Looming over them, however, is the skepticism of Senate President Karen Spilka, who for years has declined to recognize a staff union in her chamber. In 2022, when organizers achieved a supermajority of Senate staffers who signed union cards, Spilka said “the Senate does not at this time see a path forward for a traditional employer-union relationship.” Her position has not changed in the ensuing years. Meanwhile, organizers have not yet gotten a majority of House aides to signal interest in forming a union.

The section of state law covering collective bargaining for public-sector workers defines a public employee as “any person in the executive or judicial branch of a government unit,” essentially omitting legislative staff while covering workers in the other two branches of state government. The bills would update that statute to include House and Senate employees.

Since the unionization campaign charged into public view, House and Senate leaders have awarded several pay raises for aides and implemented some new programs, like harassment prevention trainings in the House.

Many staffers remain dissatisfied, however. In a survey of more than 150 aides the union campaign released last year, four out of five respondents said they are unhappy with their pay and half signaled plans to leave the Legislature within the next two years. In 2025, the median salary was $65,550 for a full-time House staffer and $84,299 for a full-time Senate staffer, according to state payroll data.

While legislative leaders remain opposed, the campaign has drawn pockets of support under the Golden Dome. About 25 lawmakers cosponsored either version of the bill, and a handful spoke in favor of it at the fall hearing, including Sen. Paul Feeney, who lamented that “this has for some reason turned into an adversarial topic.”

Feeney urged his colleagues to consider a “fundamental question”: do they agree, he asked, that the right to collectively bargain constitutes “smart public policy” in Massachusetts?

“If in your hearts and minds the answer is yes, then we can work through every single challenge that is before us,” the Foxborough Democrat, himself a former union leader, said at the hearing. “We’re smart people. That’s what we do on a daily basis. We do hard things. We can’t get lost in some of those nuances.”

So far, his plea has gone unfulfilled.