Republican legislators are expected to repeal a controversial bill clamping down on public employee unions when they meet in a special session Tuesday, averting a showdown at the ballot box next year and the potential that voters could hand the Legislature a loss by repealing the measure.
They are also planning to postpone the period for candidates to file for office — giving them time to ask the Utah Supreme Court to throw out a new court-ordered congressional map that creates a Democratic-leaning seat — and to propose a constitutional amendment weakening the citizens’ right to ballot initiatives.
The repeal of the anti-labor law, passed earlier this year, has been debated internally by Republican lawmakers for months and averts what would have been a costly campaign, the potential for being handed an embarrassing defeat by voters and also spiking 2026 voter turnout.
“It’s clear that the heated debate around these issues has created unnecessary division, which was never the intent,” Senate President J. Stuart Adams, R-Layton, and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said in a joint statement Sunday.
“Repealing the bill allows us to reset the discussion and move forward to ensure we get this right,” they said. “We’re committed to continuing conversations with all stakeholders to craft policies that support our public employees, protect public funds, and keep Utah’s government responsive and accountable to the people we serve.”
Labor groups, who spent nearly $3 million gathering more than a quarter million signatures to repeal the anti-union law in the most successful such effort in history, are supporting the repeal. The group behind the referendum push, Protect Utah Workers, a coalition of 21 labor organizations, issued a statement thanking legislators for “listening to the people.”
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Union workers host a signature gathering event to put a referendum on the 2026 ballot to rescind HB267, a law that affects the ability of public workers to organize, at University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Friday, March 21, 2025.
“We know Utahns support the rights of public workers,” the coalition said in the statement. “This repeal preserves the rights of first responders, educators, and all other critical public workers who improve the lives of Utahns every day.”
The legislation, HB267, prohibits public employee unions — like those representing police officers, firefighters, school teachers, some nurses and other government workers — from negotiating for wages and benefits with their government employers.
Gov. Spencer Cox, who said he did not like HB267 but signed it anyway, included the repeal on the agenda for a special session, scheduled Tuesday, along with the postponement of the candidate filing date and the proposed constitutional amendment on initiatives.
The delay is designed to give the Republican lawmakers more time to appeal a judge’s decision to discard Utah’s U.S. House of Representatives boundaries drawn by GOP legislators — a ruling that said the map was an illegal gerrymander benefiting Republicans, which was prohibited by the voter-passed Better Boundaries initiative passed in 2018.
Judge Dianna Gibson adopted a map that creates three safe Republican seats and one Salt Lake County-centered district favoring Democrats.
Republican lawmakers want that map repealed.
They are also planning to pass a resolution proposing a constitutional amendment guaranteeing they have the power to repeal any initiative passed by voters. Last year, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled that repealing citizen initiatives eliminates the public’s right to change laws through the initiative process and deprives citizens of that constitutional right. That amendment would need to be passed by voters next year.
Text of the proposed special session bills was publicly available as of Sunday evening.
This story is breaking and may be updated.