Democratic governor faces a choice: Siding with workers or business
Inside the intensifying battle over workers' rights in Colorado
Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
A few quick news items before we get to our main story today:
Soon after I published the story on mass firings at NIOSH, RFK Jr. used an interview on Fox News to deny that the critical health and safety agency was being eliminated. He then went ahead and had HHS begin rescinding the layoff notices that had been sent to some of its employees, including workers who administer the 9/11 first responders health program.
Republican Jefferson Griffin officially conceded the North Carolina Supreme Court election this morning after a federal judge ruled that Democratic Justice Allison Riggs was the rightful winner.
OK, now on to another big development in a story that we’ve been all over.
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Who should Democrats represent? Colorado
Democrats in the Colorado House on Tuesday voted to repeal a long-standing anti-union law, sending the legislation to Gov. Jared Polis’s desk and a very uncertain fate.
“I think he's probably pretty annoyed and I think we need to ramp up the pressure to try to get him to sign it,” the bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Javier Mabrey, told Progress Report during a phone conversation on Tuesday evening.
The Worker Protection Act would end the requirement that after workers win a standard union election, they then have to win a second election by more 75% of the vote in order to negotiate full representation.
There’s more on what that means a bit further down, but in essence, it means Colorado functions as a “right to work” state until a supermajority of workers win that onerous second election. A second election opens workers up to even more aggressive union-busting, as they have fewer federal protections, and since 2000, unions have won just 62% of second elections.
Polis has been supportive of that uniquely onerous arrangement, which serves as a modified “right to work” law, and demanded that any change be approved by the state’s business lobby.
But Democrats moved forward with the original bill anyway after more than a week of negotiations with the governor and business lobbyists failed to produce a compromise, an outcome that did not particularly surprise them.
“The Chamber of Commerce had the veto pen and what the Chamber was offering wasn't worth it,” Mabrey, who was involved in the talks, reflected. “The governor’s office said that ‘we wanted everybody to come together,’ but what they mean by that is that they wanted the Chamber to say yes.”
The Chamber offered to end the second election requirement if a union won two-thirds of the vote in the first election, or lower the threshold required to win the second election to 66%.
Polis has 30 days to decide whether to sign or veto the legislation. Both Mabrey and Dougherty said they anticipate that Polis will wield the veto pen, a decision that they promised would lead to significant consequences for a lame duck governor now considering his future.
A showdown seven years in the making
The palpable frustration reflects years of mounting differences and dashed opportunities.
Despite promises made to the AFL-CIO when he initially ran for governor in 2018, Polis’s tech-libertarian leanings have frequently led to conflicts with Colorado’s labor community.
In 2023, he came close to vetoing a bill that protects public workers from retaliation, and it took the threat of negative national press — including a story in the New York Times — to convince Polis to let it become law. There would be no stopping him a year later, when he quickly vetoed bills that would have banned captive audience meetings and allowed construction workers to sue master contractors for wage theft.
Unions and Democratic lawmakers argue that such decisions are part of why Colorado’s unionization rate continues to languish below the national average, and see ending the second election requirement as key to growing the movement. Polis has repeated right-wing talking points about the need to protect workers’ choices, frustrating advocates and scrambling public perception.
Nobody can be required to join or pay dues to the union in Colorado, and that wouldn’t change. Because the union is required to negotiate raises and benefits on every worker’s behalf, and must represent them in grievances, they have sought to guarantee “union security,” which requires workers to pay a tiny fee for those services, which are expensive to provide and lead to higher individual income. None of that money would go toward any political activity or other union activities.
The state’s skyrocketing cost of living becomes increasingly untenable. Mabrey suggests that the governor’s enormous personal wealth — he’s a tech entrepreneur who cashed in on the dot-com bubble, he’s worth north of $400 million — keeps him insulated from the real world. That legislative Democrats voted unanimously to pass the bill indicates a broader issue.
“When the Supreme Court opened the door to unlimited campaign spending, that’s meant that to win a statewide office, you either have to be an oligarch or be friends with a lot of oligarchs,” Mabrey said. “It’s impacted running for the state house, but not yet to that extent. You still have to build coalitions running for more local office, and I think those coalitions are influential on how people vote. This shows that labor is a key part of our coalition.”
Just who the party represents is the larger issue at play. For a long time, it was stretching to accommodate wealth tech moguls and the like who could give generously to campaigns, or even run for office themselves. The resultant loss in working class support reached its zenith in November, and bills like the Worker Protection Act are part of an effort to win back those voters.
Should Polis veto the bill, labor plans to use it as a litmus test in the upcoming Democratic primary to succeed him in the governor’s mansion. It has already received a commitment of support from Attorney General Phil Weiser, who declared his candidacy for the top job this winter; there’s optimism that Sen. Michael Bennet’s support for the PRO Act in DC would translate into willingness to sign the Worker Protection Act should he win the gubernatorial primary.
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