Why Did Colorado's Governor Sink Pro-Worker Legislation?

Democratic Gov. Jared Polis recently vetoed bills to protect workers’ paychecks and freedom of speech.

By Paul Blest, More Perfect Union

Once a relatively purple state, Colorado has become Democrats’ most reliable Mountain West stronghold, with all-Democratic statewide officials and big majorities in the legislature. 

Despite that, Gov. Jared Polis has proven to be a significant obstacle to advancing various progressive policies, such as when he called for an income tax cut primarily benefiting the wealthy earlier this year and denounced an effort to increase oversight of charter schools. Polis, a tech entrepreneur by trade who was once one of the richest people in Congress, exemplified those tensions recently when he vetoed a half-dozen Democratic-sponsored bills, including two that targeted wage theft and union-busting. 

The first bill would have tackled wage theft in the construction industry by holding general contractors and subcontractors jointly liable for lost wages if the latter shirked responsibility. Colorado workers lose approximately $728 million to wage theft annually, according to a 2022 report by the Colorado Fiscal Institute, and a 2020 study on the industry in three Midwestern states found that one in five construction workers were subjected to wage theft. 

During a hearing in February, painter Oscar Calderon told lawmakers that he and a crew were owed $68,000 for work performed at job sites and suffered verbal abuse and threats. “My family and I had to sell so many of our belongings…to pay the group of friends that helped us do the jobs,” Calderon told lawmakers. “It’s been over a year and we still haven’t been able to normalize our emotional, personal, and economic situation.” 

Polis said in his veto message that wage theft is a “deplorable crime,” before stripping regulators of the ability to combat it. Polis said the legislation would "let subcontractors who fail to pay their workers off the hook, do little if anything to prevent additional wage theft, and penalize good actors who pay all their workers on time."

A lobbyist for the Colorado construction industry’s trade group told The Sum & Substance, a website run by the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, that “we were excited about this policy not going forward because it was going to raise the cost of housing for people who want affordable housing and not unaffordable housing.”

Construction workers protested at the capitol in Denver after Polis vetoed the bill, donning shirts that read “Polis failed workers.” 

In a statement, the labor legal advocacy group Towards Justice said that Polis "listened to a furious campaign of corporate lobbyists interested in protecting the bottom line for big business." 

The second labor bill Polis vetoed prohibited companies from retaliating against employees who choose not to participate in mandatory “captive audience” meetings, which are used to proliferate anti-union talking points. 

Several states have laws on the books now prohibiting these mandatory-attendance meetings; just this year, Washington, Vermont, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York have passed laws banning them. National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo also authored a 2022 memo pushing for the NLRB to declare such meetings an unlawful violation of workers’ rights.

Colorado lawmakers were set to join them until the bill reached the governor’s desk. Polis called the sponsors’ goals “commendable,” but said the legislation "would put employers in the impossible position of determining when any form of speech of communication is legally protected.” (The legislation would not ban the meetings about “political or religious matters” themselves, but prohibit employers from forcing workers to attend or punishing them for not doing so.) 

The Teamsters Local 455 condemned Polis’s veto, saying that the governor’s action “sends a deeply disappointing message to workers who have supported him and his agenda, including Teamsters Local 455 members, that their priorities are not important in the state capitol.” 

This week, Polis did sign two labor-friendly bills increasing protections for Uber and Lyft drivers, one requiring that rideshare workers get the full amount of the tip paid by the rider (and receive their cut of the ride cost even when they get a good tip), and another requiring pay transparency from the companies employing them. 

Polis is term-limited and will leave office in 2026. Attendees of a rally against Polis’s vetoes reportedly included the head of the state Democratic Party, both the House and Senate Democratic majority leaders and dozens of their fellow lawmakers, Treasurer Dave Young, and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who has been mentioned as a potential candidate in the race to succeed Polis. 

But as for the current governor, frustration from fellow Democrats and the rest of the labor movement toward Polis has reached a peak. Colorado AFL-CIO seized on a typo in Polis’s statement defending his vetoes. 

“Statement from Governor Polis to Colorado Politics. ‘Governor Polis is committed to fighting hardworking Coloradans,’” the state labor federation tweeted. “Currently, we couldn't agree more. That's why 500 people rallied today at the capitol.”