With a majority of the Denver City Council saying it wants to require new bidders on city contracts to keep the employees of previous contract holders, the city of Denver is wading into a growing area of law known as “worker retention.”
About a dozen cities — including Los Angeles, Seattle and Washington — already have enacted such union-backed ordinances, which began cropping up in the 1990s.
Assistant City Attorney David Broadwell on Tuesday was reviewing past litigation on the issue in preparation for advising the council.
He said there have been about 10 legal cases on the subject, which he still was reviewing, and he was not prepared to give a legal opinion.
A similar ordinance that went into effect in Washington in the 1990s was upheld by a federal appeals court, Broadwell said.
In Los Angeles, the City Council went a step further in 2006 and put into effect a grocery “worker retention” ordinance, which limited a new company’s ability to replace a previous owner’s employees for at least three months.
The California Grocers Association sued, and in 2008, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge found the ordinance unconstitutional.
Broadwell said there is a distinction between that litigation and others. In Los Angeles, the council expanded the ordinance to cover purely private entities that had no contractual relationship with the city.
In Denver, the jobs of airport window washers have been jeopardized by the move to solicit a new round of bids for the work. Councilman Chris Nevitt asked airport officials to guarantee that the window washers would keep their jobs if the contract changed hands, but DIA manager Kim Day declined.
The airport already requires contractors to keep previous employees when a contract changes hands, but only when the employees are paid $15 an hour or less. The window washers make more than $19 an hour.
Now Nevitt and eight other members of the 13-member City Council say they want to extend “worker retention” for all service contracts for the city and airport.
Firing workers just because a new contractor comes on the scene is “both inefficient from an operational perspective, expensive from a budget perspective and cruel from a personnel perspective,” Nevitt said.
Councilman Charlie Brown, who has close ties to the business community, said he is wary.
“We need to think this through and think of the implications, not only for the employees but also for the businesses and the people who are going to seek contracts,” Brown said. “Will this impede businesses from contracting?”
