Colorado’s outdated labor law is rooted in unmistakable racism. Now is the time to modernize the law to provide all workers — especially workers of color — with the freedom to organize a union so they can openly voice their opinions at work and negotiate on safety and pay.
Colorado’s economy was very different 81 years ago, when our current labor law was passed. In 1943, Colorado’s total population was just over a million people. One of the biggest employers was the Denver Ordnance Plant, where almost 20,000 workers produced bullets for the World War II war effort in three shifts around the clock. And more than 7,000 Japanese-American citizens were prisoners at Camp Amache in Prowers County.
Vance Muse — an openly racist and anti-semitic Texas oil lobbyist — and his Christian American Association advocacy organization kicked off the wave of anti-union legislation in the 1940s and took credit for passing anti-union legislation in multiple states, including the 1943 Colorado law that added a second, supermajority election to make Colorado a “modified right-to-work” state — after workers go through a majority vote to form a union.
Muse started the Christian American Association to perpetuate the oppression of workers of color across the country. In 1936, he testified in front of a U.S. Senate committee that he was “for white supremacy ” and warned that “white women and white men will be forced into organizations with Black African apes whom they will have to call ‘brother’ or lose their jobs.”
Recognizing that racism in the workplace makes it harder for workers to unify around their common interests, Muse and his supporters used that as a strategy to push anti-worker laws. Dividing workers along racial lines opened the floodgates for business tycoons and special interests to maximize corporate profits by preventing workers from standing together in solidarity to fight for better pay and working conditions.
Motivated by a racial discrimination and a desire to weaken organizing power, Muse and the corporate interests of the time pushed for a law requiring a second, supermajority vote in an already unionized workplace to allow workers and companies to negotiate on a concept called union security.
Union security comes about because unions are legally obligated to represent every worker in a workplace. Workers seek union security so that everyone pays an amount to cover the cost of contract negotiations and worker representation. Union security does not compel any worker to become a union member and pay dues, only that they pay their share of representation costs. And under current law, a 75%-plus vote in the second election doesn’t guarantee union security — only that it may be discussed during bargaining.
The massive and growing gap between the take home pay of ordinary workers and corporate CEO compensation packages has inspired seven in 10 Americans to approve of labor unions, according to a recent Gallup poll. But Colorado’s second election law weakens unions, allowing wealthy corporations to cut corners on workplace safety and wages, exploiting ordinary working people to reap record profits.
Corporate lobbyists and C-suite billionaires benefit from Colorado’s law to interfere in the freedom of workers and employers to negotiate about what matters to them. A democratic solution would be to allow workers the freedom to put whatever they want on the bargaining agenda, including union security, higher wages, better benefits and safety at work once they have won their first vote for union recognition.
The Colorado legislature will consider Senate Bill 5, dubbed the Worker Protection Act, a bill to eliminate the second election from Colorado’s labor law. (It is scheduled for its first hearing before the Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee on Tuesday.)
Expanding workers’ rights will put more money in the pockets of working people and their families. A recent study by the Colorado Fiscal Institute estimates that workers will earn an average of $2,300 more a year if this bill is passed — an additional $5.7 billion total across the state.
For Black and Latino workers, passing this bill will right an 81-year-old injustice. Black workers — men and women — are more likely than white workers to be union members, and the wage boost they get from being covered by collective bargaining is 14.6%, above the 10.2% average wage boost for unionized workers overall, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1961, “right-to-work” and similar anti-worker laws “rob us of our civil rights and job rights” intended “to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone. … Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights.”
Justice demands that we modernize Colorado’s labor law this session.
Fredrick D. Redmond, of Washington, D.C., is the secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, and in 2022 he was elected to the position as the highest ranking African American officer in the history of America’s labor movement.
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