Well, that didn’t take long.
Gov. Bill Ritter’s “honeymoon” with the Colorado legislature and the business community ended abruptly last week when a bill to make it easier for unions to win “union shop” contracts rocketed through the House of Representatives on a 35-29 vote.
Even if it becomes law, the bill will have little practical impact. But in politics, symbolic issues often have great emotional impact. (How many people are directly affected by gay marriage, for example?)
In explaining House Bill 1072, let’s first correct a common mistake in press reports. The bill would not allow unions in Colorado to seek a “closed shop,” because such contracts – where a worker must be a member of the union before he or she is hired – are outlawed by federal law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
What you can get in Colorado is a union shop – where employees, after being hired, can be required to join the union or, in the alternative, to pay an “agency fee” to the union to offset the cost of the work the union does in negotiating their wages and terms of employment.
Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act allows states to outlaw such union shops, and 22 have done so: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wyoming.
The other 29 states are “free bargaining” states, where a union can ask the employer for a union shop. The employer doesn’t have to grant this boon to the union and, even if he or she does, it must be approved by a majority of the union members voting on the contract.
Then, there’s Colorado. Here, and only here, before a union even asks for a union shop, it must first conduct a special election in the bargaining unit – all the workers eligible to join the union, not just those who actually do belong. It must win by a supermajority of 50 percent plus one of the eligible voters or 75 percent of those actually voting, whichever is higher.
HB 1072 scraps this section of the Colorado Labor Peace Act, which was added to the original 1943 law in the early 1970s as a compromise between pro- and anti-union forces.
The issue has very little practical impact because Colorado had only 170,000 union members in 2005, about 8.4 percent of the state’s workforce. Many of those workers are public employees or work in the building trades where their union hiring halls would not be affected by HB 1072. Finally, some, not many, workers already have union shop contracts under existing state law.
Given these facts, few if any unions are likely to cajole employers into freely granting a union shop that strengthens those unions against those employers, even if HB 1072 passes. So why the hubbub?
Simply put, the business community interpreted the swift passage of this pro-union bill as a sign that it would be on the outside looking in at a state government that, for the first time since 1962, has Democrats monopolizing power in the legislature and the governor’s office.
Business felt it had earned a place at the statehouse table by raising $8 million to pass Referendum C in 2005 and because many business leaders backed Ritter over his GOP foe, Bob Beauprez. But instead of that place at the table, business got the back of the Democrats’ hands.
Maybe the Senate will take Ritter off the spot by sidelining the bill until a compromise can be worked out – like retaining the special election requirement but dropping the requirement for passage to a simple majority of the bargaining unit (not just union members.)
Failing such a face-saving move, Ritter will have to decide between offending his old friends in the labor movement or his new pals in the business community.
Bob Ewegen (bewegen@denverpost.com) is deputy editorial page editor of The Post. He holds a master’s degree in labor relations from the University of Colorado.
