Updated at 3:34 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 17, 2025
Colorado labor unions launched a new coalition Thursday to argue that the transition away from fossil fuels should be powered not just by renewable energy, but by union jobs.
Colorado’s AFL-CIO, an umbrella group for statewide unions — as well as electrical, construction, and transit unions — announced the launch of “Climate Jobs Colorado”’ at a Denver electrical apprenticeship facility. The group hopes to influence policy and corporations so that future work on wind turbines, solar panels, and geothermal energy flows through trained union workers.
The coalition’s goals, according to Dennis Dougherty, Colorado’s AFL-CIO executive director, are to take meaningful action on climate change, help workers organize and reduce economic inequality by carving out union jobs for energy projects.
“ Union workers in this room and across this state have built some of the most critical infrastructure in Colorado, to make Colorado what it is today,” Dougherty said during a press conference.
“You do not have to choose between a good, union, family-sustaining job and taking care of Colorado's climate, our water and our lands.”
The coalition’s launch dovetails with the release of a new report by state unions and Cornell University’s Climate Jobs Institute.
The report details 26 recommendations to advance the coalition’s goals, including scaling up geothermal projects, strengthening labor standards for clean energy projects and hardening infrastructure against wildfire threats.
“We demonstrate that Colorado can design climate programs that center workers and equity and ensure a transition that benefits all,” said Melissa Shetler, a co-author of the report.
The coalition is pushing for a state law that would relax a union requirement
The coalition will face its first test on Tuesday, when Colorado lawmakers debate Senate Bill 5, or the Worker Protection Collective Bargaining Act. The bill would get rid of Colorado’s requirement that 75 percent of workers vote yes to join a union in a second round of voting in order to become a union shop.
Labor leaders said the “second election” requirement is a hurdle to expanding membership.
“We’re going to have a lot of union members down at the Capitol Tuesday … to eliminate the second election and move Colorado to a free bargaining state,” Dougherty said.
Senate Bill 5 would change Colorado’s Labor Peace Act, and faces opposition from industry and potentially Governor Polis, who told CPR News that any changes to the law should be supported by both the labor and business communities.
“The Colorado Chamber supports the rights of workers to control their own paychecks, and we stand with the vast majority of Coloradans in opposition to SB 5,” wrote Colorado Chamber of Commerce CEO Loren Furman in a statement about the bill.
According to the Cornell report, Colorado’s union membership is lower than the national average and every other non-right to work state.
The report acknowledged that Coloradans have won hard-earned union contracts at fossil fuel sites, even as the state has implemented new labor standards for renewable projects.
“Unlike the contracts won by generations of coal workers, wind and solar jobs in the state have been largely low-wage with little safety or training standards,” according to the report.
Using Colorado union labor for Colorado energy projects
Jason Wardrip, the business manager of Colorado’s Building and Construction Trades Council, helped launch the coalition because he said “very few” Colorado clean energy projects were built with in-state union labor.
“They are bringing in out-of-state workers, doing our work that we're completely capable of doing … at every juncture, and we're ready to work today,” Wardrip said.
Wardrip singled out the massive Rush Creek wind project as relying on out-of-state workers.
“ [Rush Creek] really became the crux of, well, getting our [butts] kicked by out-of-state workers and out-of-state contractors,” Wardrip said.
Xcel Energy, the state’s largest utility which owns and operates Rush Creek, said in a 2017 regulatory filing that 67 percent of its main subcontractor’s construction workers were long-time Colorado residents, but the company did not specify how many were union workers.
At the time, the company also wrote that it did not know of Colorado wind farms where union labor did the main construction work.
The perception that union labor has not worked on renewable projects has at least partially changed. Dan Mondragon, an electrician and business manager for IBEW Local 113, cited union labor on Xcel Energy’s Power Pathway project as a collaboration between communities and corporations.
“This is an example of public utilities — Xcel — pushing their contractors to bring in union workers to complete the job correctly, on time and on budget,” Mondragon said.
“This is one reason why we have Climate Jobs Colorado, to help make this more the rule than the exception to the rule,” he said.
During a tour of the facility, training director Dan Hendricks pointed out equipment to bend electrical tubing, a wind turbine in the parking lot and EV chargers shaded below it. He said the clean energy transition did not require him to reinvent the wheel for training electricians.
“So yes, you're going to learn how to install a photovoltaic installation,” he said. “But you're also going to learn, you know, how to do somebody's three-way switch in their house.”
Editor's Note: A previous version of this story misstated Dennis Dougherty's title. He is the executive director of Colorado’s AFL-CIO.
