Colorado’s largest state employee union is suing Gov. Jared Polis — a clash between a self-professed “pro-union” governor and the organization he helped empower. The lawsuit, over immigration enforcement, comes weeks after Polis vetoed a bill that even he believed would expand union power too far.
The growing rift between Polis and organized labor shows that union officials are willing to cross their own, including the governor who backed their rise, when their influence is threatened. That pattern doesn’t just stop at the Capitol. From Pueblo to Denver, union officials are stretching — and possibly breaking — the law to protect their power, undermining the rights of the very rank-and-file public employees they claim to represent.
Until now, unions have found a reliable ally in Polis. In 2020, he signed a law granting Colorado WINS, the organization representing 27,000 state employees, exclusive bargaining power over the state workforce. These state workers are now represented by a union they may not have voted for, whether they choose to be members or not.
Two years later, Polis signed another law making it easier for unions to organize many county workers. And in 2023, he signed legislation restricting how certain municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals interact with and even speak about unions, while expanding union access to worker data.
Together, Polis called these acts “the greatest expansion of bargaining opportunities in Colorado in the last 80 years.” But union leaders wanted more, and the General Assembly gave it to them in May by passing Senate Bill 5, which would have made it easier for unions to force dues payments from private-sector workers.
Then Polis vetoed the bill. Within days, union leaders pledged to bypass the governor and enact the law via referendum on the 2026 ballot instead.
Weeks later, Colorado WINS and the Colorado AFL-CIO sued Polis because he ordered a state employee to comply with an immigration-related Department of Homeland Security subpoena. Colorado WINS president Diane Byrne didn’t mince words, accusing Polis of making “state workers accomplices in an illegal and morally reprehensible act.”
Whether or not the union lawsuit’s timing was a coincidence, it and the elevated language employed by the union president against a former ally reflect a sobering reality faced by many Colorado workers: Union officials are willing to turn on longtime partners if it helps preserve their power.
Even their own members aren’t off limits.
For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 ruled in Janus vs. AFSCME that public unions cannot require nonmember workers to pay so-called “fair share” fees. Yet the collective bargaining agreement between the city of Pueblo, which employs an estimated 2,000 workers, and the Pueblo Association of Government Employees union (also called AFSCME Local 1712), says the opposite.
According to the contract, enacted in 2023, years after the Janus decision, “Any person employed by the City in a position within the Bargaining Unit represented by the Union who is not a member of the Union … shall pay to the Union a fair share fee for collective bargaining.”
If union officials are enforcing this provision and charging fees to nonmembers, they are breaking the law.
And even if they aren’t charging fees, they’re still sending a chilling — and misleading — message. The contract language in Pueblo wrongly suggests that workers only have two options: join the union and pay dues or decline membership and still pay.
That’s not a real choice — it’s coercion.
The Denver Housing Authority’s contract, enacted just this year, is even worse.
According to the contract, the agency’s 300-plus employees must be full, dues-paying members of the union, AFSCME Local 535. Employees must “become a member of the Union … and shall maintain their membership in the Union,” the contract reads.
That provision blatantly violates the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Union members pay dues, which can and do fund political speech. For example, a New Jersey union reportedly spent nearly $40 million — much of it from member dues — to back its own president’s failed gubernatorial bid.
If Denver employees are being forced to become AFSCME members, it would be one of the most blatant violations of public employees’ rights of free speech and association anywhere in the country.
Though standing up to union abuses may be challenging for workers, examples in other states prove it is possible.
Pennsylvania public employee John Kabler, a client of the nonprofit law firm the Fairness Center, where I am president, forced his union, through litigation, to back off a membership requirement like that in Denver. And Pennsylvania teachers Jane Ladley and Dave Perotti also successfully sued their unions over “fair share” contract provisions similar to Pueblo’s.
As union power grows in Colorado — with or without the governor’s support — it may be up to the employees to hold union officials to the letter of the law.
Nathan McGrath of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is president and general counsel for the Fairness Center, a nonprofit law firm representing those hurt by public-sector union officials.
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