David Zalubowski/AP Photo
On March 13, the Worker Protection Act made it through the Colorado Senate with unanimous support from Democratic legislators.
As the Trump administration continues its blitzkrieg on organized labor, staging unprecedented attacks on agencies like the NLRB and throwing out the contracts of federal employees’ unions, state legislatures have emerged as battlegrounds for employees seeking to improve their wages and working conditions.
In Colorado, labor activists and progressive legislators are campaigning to advance the Worker Protection Act, which would modify the state’s 1943 Labor Peace Act (LPA), a law that weakens labor unions and thereby exacerbates the state’s wealth gap. Though defended by Colorado business groups as a proper middle ground between the interests of labor and management, a look at the law’s history reveals its role in an era characterized by national efforts to maintain segregation.
When it comes to labor law, Colorado is a one-state anomaly. Within so-called “right to work” states, employees in businesses where unions have won recognition don’t have to pay union dues. In states without these laws, employees are required to pay either union dues or an administrative fee. Then there’s Colorado, where once workers win a union, they then need to vote in a second election to determine whether the union can collect dues or fees from its employees. A simple majority won’t suffice: The union must win a 75 percent supermajority to be assured that the workers it represents will pay those dues or fees. Colorado is the only state in the country with such a requirement, and the only state with a Democratic governor, legislature, and both senators that isn’t governed by a law that allows unions to organize free from the fear that workers won’t support the union financially if it wins its election.
The Worker Protection Act aims to do away with this roadblock. Spearheaded by Colorado Worker Rights United, a coalition of labor unions and community groups, the act seeks to repeal the LPA’s second election requirement. This would allow private-sector workers to negotiate union security with employers without having to win the state-mandated second election.
As enshrined in federal law, union security agreements require that all employees in a bargaining unit either join a union and pay dues, or contribute an agency fee to cover the costs associated with representation. But in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act amended that federal law, giving states the authority to allow employees in unionized workplaces to forgo paying any dues, even though the union was still obligated to represent them in, say, any grievances they had with management.
“You can’t expect to have a bargaining relationship with an employer if the question of whether your union is going to be in place from one day to the next is always an open question,” says Jennifer Sherer, deputy director of state research and policy at the Economic Policy Institute and an author of a report on Colorado’s second election law. “But those are the conditions under which unions in so-called ‘right to work’ states have to operate constantly.”
The Labor Peace Act is a major reason why Colorado’s rate of union membership trails that of other Democratic-dominated states.
Organizers say the second election requirement exacerbates the already aggressive and often illegal tactics companies use to suppress organizing: “They were cornering us one-on-one, we had captive-audience meetings, we were threatened about losing our benefits and wages,” says Liza Nielsen, who helped organize the first Starbucks to unionize in Colorado. “The second election gave [management] another opportunity to silence workers’ voices and take away the freedom to organize in the workplace.”
Colorado employers have also found ways to shirk negotiations even after their workers win the second election, leaving some employees to question the election’s relevance. “Management came to us at the bargaining table and basically said, ‘We don’t really care how you voted,’” Ben Ullrich, a former distiller who led a union campaign at Stranahan’s Whiskey, told the Prospect. After Stranahan’s parent company, Proximo, suppressed the union campaign by enacting punitive scheduling changes and refusing to bargain, they exploited a grandfather clause that allowed them to operate under a pre-existing agreement in Indiana, a right-to-work state. “We jumped through all these extra hoops and ultimately we were just completely sidelined by Proximo’s corporate policy,” said Ullrich. (Refusing to bargain even if workers vote to join a union isn’t limited to Colorado; it’s a common management strategy throughout the nation.)
The LPA is a major reason why Colorado’s rate of union membership trails that of other Democratic-dominated states. Colorado’s 2024 union membership rate, 7.7 percent, is 22 percent below the national average of 9.9, and income inequality within the state has outpaced the national average, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute. Should the Worker Protection Act become law, economists believe it could help diminish that inequality, with one study from the Colorado Fiscal Institute estimating that it could raise the yearly median income of the state’s private-sector employees by as much as $2,500.
Historians say that the state’s high level of inequality stems from Colorado’s role in a broader effort to advance right-to-work laws as a means to preserve Jim Crow labor relations. The origins of right to work can be traced to Dallas Morning News editorial writer William Ruggles, an anti-unionist who “not only was an outright opponent of union dues being deducted, he was an ardent segregationist,” says Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University. “It’s not a coincidence that Florida and other Southern states became the places that first jumped on ‘right to work.’”
Adopted four years before the Taft-Hartley Act enabled states to go right-to-work, Colorado’s law, McCartin says, helped lay the groundwork for states that then went on to adopt such statutes. “The Colorado law actually preceded the spread of right-to-work laws,” says McCartin. “In anticipation of this growing movement, what happened in Colorado was kind of a halfway measure.”
Confronted by the rising civil rights movement, however, right-to-work groups like the National Right to Work Committee began shrouding their initial support for segregation in arguments based on individual rights. “Initially, [the committee], which came out of the Gothic South, argued that unions are communistic, are race mixing,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “By the late ’50s and early ’60s, they changed. They would say, ‘The unions are undemocratic. Here are these African Americans or women who are being forced to join these horrible, reactionary institutions. And it’s their civil rights which we are defending.’ That became their argument for decades.”
For their part, leaders of the actual civil rights movement continually linked the causes of racial equality and workers’ rights to unionization. Martin Luther King Jr., in a 1961 speech to the AFL-CIO, explained that “the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin headed creature, spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.”
On March 13, after the Worker Protection Act made it through the Colorado Senate with unanimous support from Democratic legislators, Colorado’s business community expressed their discontent: “We stand by respecting employee choice and want to ensure that a small minority of workers can’t make a decision on behalf of everyone at a workplace to pay mandatory union dues,” said Colorado Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Loren Furman, in a March 14 news release. “We’re disappointed that lawmakers moved forward a proposal that lacks balance and threatens Colorado’s competitiveness.”
McCartin calls this framing a “completely disingenuous view,” arguing that it’s instead a matter of upholding democratic principles. “Just as governments should be able to be empowered by the votes of a majority and have taxing power so that it’s able to do its work, the same principle needs to apply in the workplace,” he says.
The bill is expected to pass the Colorado House and be fast-tracked to Gov. Jared Polis, who will ultimately decide its fate. Polis (with a net worth as high as $400 million), who has been described as a libertarian and has praised Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, is as anomalous as his state. Though a Democrat, he’s previously drawn the ire of Colorado’s labor movement by vetoing several pro-worker bills. Labor leaders suggest that if he continues down that path, he may damage his future prospects.
“We’re looking for him to choose to stand with us and Colorado’s families over mega-corporations and billionaires and CEOs,” says Dennis Dougherty, executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO. “I don’t think he wants the moniker ‘Right-to-Work Polis’ hovering around him for the rest of his political career.”
Colorado’s labor movement is continuing to apply pressure. On March 19, hundreds of Colorado Worker Rights United workers and supporters rallied in Denver to urge Polis to sign the act into law, and delivered thousands of postcards supporting the bill to his office.
Despite resurgent public support for the labor movement, with union approval ratings reaching rates up to 70 percent (the highest it’s been since the 1960s), the tattered condition of legal protections for workers who seek to organize has ensured that the rate of unionization continues to decline. At a time when Republican control of federal and state governments dooms any efforts to bolster those protections both nationally and in red states, the current fight in Colorado is the sole campaign in the country—for the next several years, at least—that could make it easier for workers to gain a voice on the job and a modicum of power in their workplace. That’s an opportunity that the state and its governor would do well to meet.
