Liza Nielsen applied to work at Starbucks because of the “promised magical benefits” the company offered, including tuition and health care reimbursement.

But when she started at the coffee giant’s Superior store in early 2021, her expectations curdled. She and her co-workers were consistently shorthanded, she said, and they had to fight for enough shifts to unlock the benefits that had attracted Nielsen to the job in the first place. “It was a workplace built for burnout,” she said.

Nielsen and her co-workers organized to form a union, part of a growing and national wave of worker organizing at Starbucks. Amid anti-union tactics that federal labor regulators found ran afoul of federal law, Nielsen and her co-workers successfully formed a union with 99% of staffers voting in support, she said.

The group has since joined with other Starbucks workers in a national effort to craft a first union contract.

That process is still underway. But when it’s done, Nielsen said, unionized Starbucks employees in Colorado — like thousands of organized workers before them — will be alone in the United States in having to pass a second election before they can advance a key piece of their prospective contract: membership in the union and the collection of dues and fees.

Nielsen, who left Starbucks and is now a full-time labor organizer, said trying to pass another election after the uphill climb of winning the first — with a higher threshold this time — is “extremely anxiety-inducing and just feels super unfair.”

In one of the most contentious fights of the legislative session, a group of Democratic lawmakers is trying to do away with that second election, striking it from an 81-year-old state law.

Senate Bill 5 would eliminate a unique provision of Colorado law that has left the state with one foot in anti-union waters that are more common in conservative “right to work” states.

The proposal has the backing of a swath of labor unions and Democratic legislators, who argue that the second election is unnecessary and outdated. They contend that putting an additional obstacle between workers and negotiating — and between unions and the dues that support their work — primarily serves to undercut organizing, while giving companies another chance to launch anti-union campaigns.

“There’s no defensible reason to have the second election, except to throw up these barriers and make it really difficult for people to follow through with their own choice to form a union,” said Sen. Jessie Danielson, a Wheat Ridge Democrat and one of the bill’s primary sponsors. The measure is also backed by Reps. Javier Mabrey and Jennifer Bacon and Sen. Robert Rodriguez, all Denver Democrats.

But critics — who include much of the business community and, more crucially, Gov. Jared Polis — argue that the bill upends decades of labor law in Colorado.

It’s a status quo that they consider a compromise between workers and employers. They counter that Colorado’s labor laws make the state more attractive for businesses looking to move or expand, and they say that changing those laws will hamper the state’s lagging competitiveness.

“We feel very strongly that the compromise has served us well,” J.J. Ament, president and CEO of the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, said of the second-election provision. “The economic data has shown that it’s served us well. Job growth in Colorado outperforms both fully right-to-work states and fully union-shop states.”

Loren Furman, the president and CEO of the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, said the state’s regulatory environment has become more burdensome for business. She shares Ament’s fear that changing the law may make Colorado even less attractive to companies.

Polis, a Democrat who vetoed labor bills in May, has told lawmakers that he intends to veto this bill, too.

In a statement to The Denver Post on Wednesday, Polis spokeswoman Shelby Wieman said the governor wanted to see the labor and business groups negotiate further, but Polis “remains skeptical of eliminating the second election.”

The bill passed its first vote, in front of a Senate committee, on Tuesday. It’s now one committee vote away from the Senate floor. Should it pass both votes there next month, it’ll move to the House and restart the process.

Business and union leaders met Wednesday, and Furman said it was a good discussion. She declined to talk about a possible compromise but said business advocates were willing to explore lowering any administrative barriers to forming unions.

However, Furman is leery of legislation she considers “a monumental change to a law” that’s been in place for decades.

“It’s the kind of legislation that takes time to talk about,” she said. “This is not simple.”

Peace and labor

In 1943, eight years after the National Labor Relations Act enshrined union protections in federal law, the Colorado legislature overwhelmingly passed the Labor Peace Act.

The federal law requires a majority of a company’s workers to vote in favor of a union before that union can represent them. The Colorado statute added the second election: It requires workers to pass another vote, with up to 75% support needed, before those workers can begin negotiating a provision in union contracts known as the union- security clause.

In essence, the union-security clause describes union membership and the collection of union dues, paid by members, or representation fees, paid by non-member workers who are covered by the union’s contracts and represented by it in disputes. Those clauses are typical in union contracts, which are negotiated between the company and its workers, and contracts are approved by a majority vote of union members.

Removing the second election from the Labor Peace Act, as Democratic lawmakers are seeking to do, would not mean that all workers at unionized companies must join the union and pay dues. That provision must still be negotiated and sought by workers, and the process begins after the second election is successful.

If unions fail to pass the second election, they cannot negotiate membership and the subsequent collection of dues and fees, and such participation becomes fully voluntary, as it is in states with so-called right-to-work laws.

Supporters of the Labor Peace Act say the second election acts as another check to ensure that a supermajority of workers supports paying union dues and fees. But Democratic lawmakers and union officials say it’s intended to financially undercut unions, divide organized workers and impede organizing generally.