OPINION: Municipal Collective Bargaining Law in Colorado Effectively Permits Union Busting

This op-ed by by Nicholas Sahwin appeared on Colorado Newsline on August 14, 2026.

While Colorado labor organizers and activists have been (rightly) concerned for the past several years with passing the Worker Protection Act, there is an often overlooked but equally important route toward worker empowerment in the state: Municipal collective bargaining.

The Worker Protection Act would strengthen labor rights for private sector workers in Colorado, but it excludes from its scope public sector workers. Fortunately, government workers in Colorado have been given a shield and a light gladius in the form of the Protections for Public Workers Act, or PROPWA. The protections granted to government workers by this state law are substantial, and they pave the way for a new era of public sector labor organizing in Colorado.

However, there is a deficit in PROPWA that prevents its gladius from becoming a broadsword, insofar as it creates in a public sector employer no obligation to recognize a union that may form under PROPWA’s aegis. A city’s municipal workforce may unanimously vote to unionize, but their employer can simply refuse to acknowledge the union till kingdom come, effectively union busting, with no legal recourse for the workers.

This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. In 2024, my team at Fort Collins Connexion (a municipal broadband department) were among the first to unionize under the newly effective PROPWA. Though a supermajority of the Connexion tech support team voted to unionize, City Manager Kelly DiMartino read our union announcement letter and, upon returning to office from Labor Day weekend, stated that she would not recognize or bargain with the union. She provided no explicit reasoning for her declination beyond the fact that she was not required by law to recognize any union.

“No bargaining will take place,” she stated bluntly. Coupled with Fort Collins’ collaborative relationship with Employers Council, a firm with a notable history of consulting employers on “union avoidance”, it would not be a misrepresentation, I think, to say that the city of Fort Collins has engaged in union busting against its workers.

Rather than permanently deterring municipal workers from standing up for their rights, Fort Collins’ union busting reveals the general direction of the legislative struggle toward public sector labor justice. And it is Denver voters who mapped out the route. In November 2024, Denver voters approved Referred Question 2U, which advances collective bargaining rights for the city’s thousands of municipal workers. Due to this newly approved ordinance, the city of Denver cannot adopt the same stonewalling tactic as DiMartino has adopted in Fort Collins; so long as certain conditions are met, the Denver must engage in collective bargaining with its employees.

Rather than capitulate to the recalcitrance of their employer, municipal workers can, in conjunction with other labor organizers and their city’s voters, change the law in their favor and thus dictate the terms of union recognition and collective bargaining going forward. What’s more, this can happen either at the city level (as was the case in Denver), or more broadly at the state level. We can implement municipal collective bargaining laws piecemeal as the need becomes exigent (yesterday in Denver; today in Fort Collins; tomorrow in Pueblo), or we can push for an all-at-once option and submit the question to voters on the statewide ballot.

Either way will necessitate much ground-level organizing, but such organizing is necessary to the prosperity of Coloradans going forward. As the Trump administration weakens the protections previously afforded by the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board, we can no longer rely on federal level rulings and boards to protect Colorado workers. We must take our rights into our own hands and continue to shore up labor protections here at home, through the Worker Protection Act for private sector workers, yes, and through municipal collective bargaining laws for those of us in the public sector.

PROPWA is only the beginning of the municipal collective bargaining struggle in Colorado. Now organizers, legislators, and voters must bolster PROPWA by giving it what teeth it lacks. Specifically, we must codify the conditions under which municipal labor unions must be recognized and begin collective bargaining.

There is plenty of work to be done, but I trust Coloradans to meet the challenge head on. As the popular strike chant goes: The workers united will never be defeated.