A bill to upend Colorado’s Labor Peace Act cleared another key legislative hurdle on Thursday — but only after a compromise proposal from a Democratic legislator was swatted away on a technicality.
Senate Bill 5 moves now onto the House Appropriations Committee, which is expected to pass the measure quickly to the full legislative chamber. If that passes as expected, it will set up a high-profile showdown between Democratic legislators and Gov. Jared Polis, who has threatened officials from his own party to veto the bill if they can’t find reach consensus on it with business leaders.
SB 5 would eliminate the second election that is required to allow unions to take negotiating fees out of all covered employees’ checks — a vote that must pass with 75% approval — after a workplace votes to unionize. As it did in the Senate, it passed on a Democrat-led party-line vote — at least among members of the committee who stuck around to cast that vote.
Most of the three-hour hearing before the House Business Affairs & Labor Committee mirrored a similar discussion held in January in the Senate Business, Labor & Technology Committee, with labor advocates speaking for SB 5 and business leaders criticizing it. Then Rep. Bob Marshall, D-Highlands Ranch, threw a curve into discussions by offering an amendment that would have eliminated the second election but required the first union vote to pass by more than 60% for unions to take fees from all workers’ checks.
One election with two standards?
Colorado state Rep. Bob Marshall speaks to a gathering at the Colorado Chamber of Commerce in 2024.
While Marshall said he sympathized with union leaders who argued that the second election serves as an obstacle to organizing, he said he also worried about the “tyranny of the majority” forcing as much as 49% of workers who oppose unionization to pay fees. While business and labor leaders have been negotiating for months on potential solutions, Marshall said that this supermajority idea was purely his own, feeling it was “the most reasonable solution going forward.”
Rep. Javier Mabrey, who is cosponsoring SB 5 in the House with fellow Denver Democratic Rep. Jennifer Bacon, pushed back against the proposal, saying that neither proponents nor opponents had asked for that amendment.
But before there could be further discussion, Rep. William Lindstedt, D-Broomfield, suggested that the amendment didn’t fit under the title of a bill on “concerning the elimination of the requirement for a second election to negotiate a union security clause.” Rep. Naquetta Ricks, the Aurora Democrat who chairs the committee, agreed, and the amendment was nixed.
Marshall, who has clashed at times with his legislative cohorts over process questions, was noticeably absent for the final vote and was marked as excused. And the bill moved on, with Mabrey arguing it’s particularly vital at a time when President Donald Trump is eroding worker and consumer protections at the federal level, leaving Colorado to protect its own.
“We have to take a second to listen to the noise outside this building,” Mabrey said. “We are seeing a full-on takeover of our federal government. The stakes could not be higher.”
History of Labor Peace Act
Colorado Chamber of Commerce President/CEO Loren Furman testifies in January with a panel of business leaders against the proposed overhaul of the Labor Peace Act.
Colorado legislators approved the Labor Peace Act in 1943, and it’s stood as a compromise between the 26 right-to-work states where no worker can be forced to pay union fees and the 23 states where workers must just unions to hold jobs at organized companies. That has helped Colorado maintain its economic competitiveness, several business leaders said, despite rising costs of complying with regulations and doing business that have put Colorado in the most expensive quartile of states in which to operate a company.
SB 5 is moving ahead as Colorado Restaurant Association President/CEO Sonia Riggs said organizers are targeting independent restaurants and Colorado Competitive Council Director Rachel Beck noted polling that 70% of voters oppose mandatory paycheck fees. It also comes at an inflection point where 47% of Colorado employers told a Colorado Chamber of Commerce survey late last year that they are not likely to invest in the state in the future because of the growing regulatory burden here.
“We’re very concerned that a change in policy like this could disincentivize business from coming here or from staying in Colorado,” said Colorado Chamber President/CEO Loren Furman to the committee.
Impacts on workers, employers
Most proponents focused on the impact that SB 5 could have on workers. Colorado Fiscal Institute labor policy analyst Sophie Miriam said that boosting union membership could raise worker salaries by $5.7 billion annually — an average of $2,500 per person. Casa Bonita bartender Michelle Mendenhall said the elimination of a second election would prevent the anti-union badgering she and her coworkers got from management as they prepared to vote for a second time late last year.
“The second election under the Colorado Labor Peace Act isn’t about giving workers a choice,” said Bryant Preston, president of the Colorado AFL-CIO, in attempting to rebut a point made repeatedly by opponents of SB 5. “It’s about creating barriers and delays.”
Mabrey argued that organizing workers would not hurt employers, as critics complained, as those workers only have incentives to help their companies succeed and, thus, keep their jobs and receive higher wages. But Colorado Business Roundtable President Debbie Brown said that making it easier to organize in a way that robbed workers of a full voice on whether to pay fees would create an artificial barrier in employers’ relationships with workers.
Labor Peace Act proposal spawns two initiatives
Republicans agreed unanimously with the bill’s critics, setting SB 5 up for another partisan collision on the floor of the House.
“We are doing so much in our building to chase businesses out of our state, and I think this is another measure that does that,” said Rep. Ryan Armagost, R-Berthoud.
Meanwhile, two proposed ballot initiatives could complicate discussions around the bill, as proponents of either could push forward with them if the legislative outcome doesn’t suit their preferences. Independence Institute President Jon Caldara has gotten the title approved for a constitutional amendment to make Colorado a right-to-work state, while union leaders on Friday submitted an initiative to require employers to prove “just cause” before they can terminate an employee.
Business and labor leaders are expected to continue to negotiate to see if they can find the consensus that has eluded their talks so far.