Six months of discussions about overhauling Colorado’s Labor Peace Act broke down this weekend, leaving legislative Democrats to move ahead Monday with the long-delayed Senate Bill 5, threats of a veto from Gov. Jared Polis be damned.
House members gave the bill preliminary approval after two hours and 15 minutes of debate, setting it up for final passage on Tuesday, which is the next-to-last day of the 2025 legislative session. Business and labor leaders criticized each other for failing to compromise enough as they debated numerous alternative proposals in recent weeks but couldn’t find a path forward on any of them.
Instead, what will land on Polis’ desk is the same proposal introduced on the session’s first day — a plan to nix Colorado’s unique second election, in which 75% approval is needed to let unions bargain collectively to take negotiating fees from each employee’s paycheck. Labor activists say this is a burdensome roadblock to organizing and want “union security” allowed as a condition of majority approval in the first election, while business leaders say it protects workers who don’t want to be forced to pay unions they don’t support.
How the Labor Peace Act negotiations unfurled
Business leaders began offering compromise proposals on Jan. 22, and their final offer would have allowed for elimination of the second election and approval of union security if 66% of workers voted “yes” at the first election— or would have reduced the union-security bar to 66% in the second election if workers didn’t hit that bar the first time around. Union negotiators said they were OK with the general structure of the proposal but wanted the bar to be 53% approval.
The Democratic governor, who said in his State of the State Address in January that he didn’t want to sign a bill unless the two sides had negotiated an agreement, got very involved in discussions over the past month and offered several proposals. Polis threw curveballs into those talks by seeking things such as different bars for small and large companies and different requirements on what percentage of workers must vote in a unionization election, but nothing got agreement from both sides.
Just after 5:30 p.m. Saturday, Colorado AFL-CIO Executive Director Dennis Dougherty, co-chair of the Colorado Worker Rights United coalition pushing SB 5, put out a news release saying that business had “walked away” from talks and that SB 5 was the only option left. And he urged Polis in that statement to “stand with Colorado’s nurses, construction workers and service employees … instead of siding with billionaire CEOs and corporate consultants trying to maintain the status quo.”
“We’re moving forward with the Worker Protection Act because Colorado can’t continue to fall behind while families struggle and powerful billionaires and corporations silence workers who speak up,” Dougherty wrote. “This bill gives workers a fair shot to form strong unions, win better contracts and build an economy that works for all of us, not just those at the top.”
Business leaders defend efforts on Labor Peace Act
Loren Furman is president and CEO of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce.
Colorado Chamber of Commerce President/CEO Loren Furman balked at the assertion that business had left the table, saying that a coalition that included Colorado Concern, the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and others made repeated good-faith offers. The final offer reflected a big compromise on the initial reluctance to do away with the second election, but held to the idea that workers shouldn’t have to turn over 2% of paychecks to unions they don’t back unless far more than a simple majority of them agree they should.
“Look, we stood by on our last and final offer, which we thought was a very strong offer,” Furman said. “We also stood by making sure that all employees had a choice whether or not fees were taken from their paychecks.”
That argument continued onto the House floor Monday when Rep. Bob Marshall, D-Highlands Ranch, offered an amendment that would have eliminated the second election needed for union security only if at least 60% of voters in the first one backed organization. Marshall had made the same proposal in a mid-March House committee meeting, but the chairwoman had ruled it did not fit under the title of the bill — “Concerning the elimination of the requirement for a second election to negotiate a union-security clause in the collective-bargaining process” — causing Marshall to storm out of the room.
After some debate on the proposal Monday — cosponsoring Rep. Javier Mabrey, D-Denver, called the proposed amendment “unfair” and noted it takes only a majority of workers to decertify a union — it again was ruled to violate the bill title and pulled from consideration. With no more compromises deemed possible, debate proceeded on the bill as expected.
Both side targeting Polis now
Cosponsoring Rep. Jennifer Bacon said that unions are needed to boost the pay of workers in state where the cost of living is rising faster than salaries and said the second election was an antiquated, anti-union guardrail that’s led to Colorado’s low unionization rate. Mabrey framed the need for SB 5 in the context of the federal government slashing jobs and eliminating some consumer-protection and workers-rights programs, saying the bill is meant for the 60% of residents who live paycheck to paycheck.
Colorado state Rep. Max Brooks speaks Monday in the House against the proposal overhaul of the Labor Peace Act.
“One of the greatest threats facing our democracy right now is the influence the wealthiest Americans have over our government and our entire system,” Mabrey said. “This bill is about empowering those Coloradans to stand up for better workplaces and to stand up for higher wages in an economy that is increasingly rigged against them.”
Rep. Chris Richardson, R-Elizabeth, rebutted that what the bill was about was not letting a simple majority of workers compel speech by their coworkers by forcing them to turn over a portion of their paychecks if they don’t want to. Rep. Max Brooks, R-Castle Rock, added that the potential costs of being forced to pay a union are just one more example of how Democratic-made laws are a primary reason for the hike in the cost of living and how they will make Colorado less competitive for jobs.
“It’s important to be very clear about what the bill does and doesn’t do. It isn’t about whether workers can form a union. That right exists and remains,” Richardson told the House chamber. “This is about forcing people to pay union (fees) against their will, even if they want nothing to do with the union. It is mandatory, compulsory fees that, if not paid, could result in losing a job.”
Two ballot initiatives could impact fate of Labor Peace Act overhaul
Sponsors also directed some of their debate not to the House, which appeared to pass SB 5 largely along party lines in a voice vote, but to Polis, who ultimately will decide the fate of the bill. Business leaders intend to lobby the governor to veto the bill as hard as labor advocates expect to lobby him to sign it.
“I would think, as a figurehead of the Democratic Party, he will do what Democrats ask him to do and what we have incessantly worked on,” Bacon said.
Polis will have to think about what electoral consequences could result from his signing or vetoing SB 5 as well.
Independence Institute President Jon Caldara has said that if Polis signs the bill into law, he will move forward with putting onto the 2026 ballot an initiative, which has gotten approval from the state title-setting board, to convert Colorado to a right-to-work state. The twenty-six states that fall into that category prohibit any requirement for workers, even at unionized companies, to pay dues or negotiating fees to unions as a requirement of their jobs, and they have the lowest rates of private-sector unionization.
If Polis vetoes the bill, however, Dougherty has said the AFL-CIO is likely to push a separate ballot measure in 2026 that would require employers to offer just cause for firing any workers or face the threat of lawsuits. Montana is the only state with a just-cause law now, and it contains far more loopholes for employers than the initiative that the labor group has filed with the state, leading to fears that the Colorado measure would make the state even less attractive for businesses.