HB 339 Virginia House of Delegates · 2026 Regular Session

Employee protections; wage and hour, health and safety, and mining safety provisions.

Summary

Employee protections; wage and hour, health and safety, and mining safety provisions; federal rules. Requires that, if a federal wage or hour law, federal occupational health and safety law, or federal mine safety law is repealed, revoked, amended, or reinterpreted in any manner that results in the federal protections becoming less stringent or effective, the Commissioner, the Safety and Health Codes Board, or the Department of Energy, respectively, shall promulgate regulations that incorporate the federal law as it existed prior to being repealed, revoked, amended, or newly interpreted.

Issues: ✓ Labor & Employment

Bill status passed 3 of 5 stages cleared

Introduction

Jan 2026

Committee Review

Mar 2026

House of Delegates Passage

Feb 2026

Senate Passage

Governor

Introduced Jan 12, 2026 Last action Mar 9, 2026

Maddy AI version diff · 2 comparisons

What changed between versions

Labor and Commerce Substitute → Subcommittee #2 Subcommittee Substitute · 1 edit

MINOR

The bill text was reformatted from a standard legislative format to a House Substitute version with different spacing and line breaks. The substantive policy content, including the Safety and Health Codes Board composition, wage and hour protections, and mining safety provisions, remains unchanged. This appears to be a procedural formatting update rather than a substantive policy change.

TECHNICAL

Formatting and layout changes including spacing, line breaks, and header positioning were altered to match House Substitute markup conventions. The actual legislative text content remains identical.

Introduced → Labor and Commerce Substitute · 5 edits

MODERATE

The bill was amended from its original introduced version to a House Committee substitute version. The primary change is the removal of provisions related to prevailing wage requirements for public works contracts, which were originally included in the bill. The substitute version now focuses exclusively on occupational safety and health standards, wage and hour protections, and mining safety provisions, removing the broader labor and wage enforcement components.

Scope change

The bill's scope was significantly narrowed. The original version covered prevailing wage requirements for public works contracts in addition to safety and health provisions. The substitute version removed all prevailing wage provisions, leaving only occupational safety, health, wage and hour, and mining safety provisions.

REQUIREMENT

All provisions related to prevailing wage requirements for public works contracts, including definitions of prevailing wage, contractor obligations to pay prevailing wages, record-keeping requirements, and enforcement mechanisms for wage violations, were removed from the bill.

ENFORCEMENT

Provisions allowing interested parties to challenge bid specifications that violate prevailing wage requirements and recover attorney fees were removed.

SCOPE

The bill's title and introductory language were modified to reflect the removal of prevailing wage provisions, changing the focus from 'employee protections; prevailing wage, wage and hour, occupational health and safety, and mining safety provisions' to 'employee protections; wage and hour, occupational health and safety, and mining safety provisions'.

TECHNICAL

The bill's section references were updated to remove § 2.2-4321.3 (prevailing wage) from the list of amended sections, leaving only § 40.1-22, § 40.1-22.2, and § 45.2-502.1.

ELIGIBILITY

Provisions allowing localities to adopt ordinances requiring prevailing wage payments for public works contracts were removed.

Floor votes · House of Delegates Feb 2, 2026

How they voted

53–34

Passed · 1 other

Total votes 88

Feb 2, 2026

D Democratic53

53 Yea

100% Yea

R Republican35

34 Nay 1

97% Nay

Vote distribution

All Yea All Nay Mixed No data

Full legislative history

Actions timeline

Total actions

Key actions

Committee

Mar 9, 2026

Upper · Passed

Reported from Commerce and Labor with amendments and rereferred to Finance and Appropriations (9-Y 6-N)

upper

Mar 9, 2026

Upper · Passed

Senate committee offered

upper

Feb 3, 2026

Committee

Referred to Committee on Commerce and Labor

upper

Feb 2, 2026

Lower · Passed

Read third time and passed House (64-Y 35-N 0-A)

lower

Jan 27, 2026

Lower · Passed

Reported from Labor and Commerce with substitute (15-Y 7-N)

lower

Jan 22, 2026

Lower · Passed

House subcommittee offered

lower

Jan 19, 2026

Committee

Assigned HCL sub: Subcommittee #2

lower

Jan 12, 2026

Committee

Referred to Committee on Labor and Commerce

lower

1 primary · 10 co-sponsors