Denver’s City Council on Monday spiked a proposal to guarantee the jobs of certain city employees if a new management team is hired for a project, in favor of an executive order to do roughly the same thing.
The so-called worker retention law would have required contractors that do business with the city — such as janitorial services and window washers — to give the current workers 90 days to accept employment with a new management contractor.
There has been a similar rule in place for some contracts at Denver International Airport since 2003.
Without the law, new contractors would be free to bring in their own crews, something City Councilman Chris Nevitt said could be problematic for the city because experienced workers could be replaced by new hires.
But the business community, leery of the idea, lobbied Mayor John Hickenlooper against it.
Nevitt, who introduced the bill more than two months ago, said he had eight council votes to pass it but not the nine it would take to override a mayoral veto.
Nevitt said he believed that Hickenlooper would veto the bill.
So in the past two weeks, Nevitt worked out a compromise in which Hickenlooper will issue an executive order allowing the workers the 90-day first-right-of-refusal, but with a few differences.
Under the draft order, employees would be prevented from suing the city if they lost their job for any reason. Also, city departments would have a process through which they could opt out of the order if they felt it was in the best interest of the city or the department.
Nevitt said the proposed executive order is based on a similar executive order that President Barack Obama signed for federal workers two weeks after taking office in January.
“I would have preferred to have the law, but if it’s good enough for President Obama, I guess it’s good enough for me,” he said after the council meeting Monday night.
The council agreed in principle to go along with the idea of an executive order, provided that Hickenlooper explain it to them at the June 1 council meeting. The council then voted 10-0 to kill Nevitt’s bill.
Mike McPhee: 303-954-1409 or mmcphee@denverpost.com
