Tag Archives: janus v afscme

Chicago Teachers Might Strike. A Group of Parents, Backed by a Right-Wing Law Firm, Stands to Sue.

Originally published in The Intercept on February 3, 2021.
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THIS WEEK IN Chicago, as the local teachers union considers whether to strike over the safety of the city’s school reopening plan during the pandemic, a group of at least nine parents represented by the Liberty Justice Center, a conservative public interest law firm, say they’re ready to sue if educators vote for a work stoppage.

Lawyers with the Liberty Justice Center — the same legal organization which brought the landmark Janus v. AFSCME lawsuit in 2018 to the U.S Supreme Court — argue a Chicago Teachers Union strike would be in violation of Illinois law and the union’s current collective bargaining agreement. The CTU contract commits to avoiding strikes or pickets while the agreement is in effect. “That doesn’t change even if [Chicago Public Schools] engages in an unfair labor practice or allegedly requires teachers to work in an unsafe environment,” attorney Jeffrey Schwab wrote recently in the Chicago Tribune. “It has become clear that kids are collateral damage for the union’s political and financial leverage.”

Chicago is not the only city where the anti-union law firm is seizing on parents’ frustration with virtual learning to help bring challenges against one of their long-standing political targets. The Liberty Justice Center is also representing parents in Chandler, Arizona, and Fairfax County, Virginia, where educators have organized sick-outs to protest school reopening plans. The group is an affiliate of the right-wing State Policy Network and has ties to the Bradley Foundation and the Koch network. Kristen Williamson, a spokesperson for the Liberty Justice Center, told The Intercept their lawyers stand ready to sue if teachers “use the illegal tactic again” and that they represent parents free of charge.

In late October, the Fairfax Education Association, which represents about 4,000 teachers and staff, urged its members to call out sick for a mental health day, as the union determined proposals to resume in-person learning. The vast majority of students in Fairfax County, the 10th largest school district in the country, have been learning from home since the coronavirus pandemic began last March. (A district spokesperson said the impact on instruction from the sick-out was minimal.) In December, the Liberty Justice Center sent a demand letter to the union and the school district warning them that the sick-out had been an illegal strike under Virginia law. The attorneys promised to sue if teachers take that step again.

Nellie Rhodes, a Fairfax County parent, is one of a handful of plaintiffs who have been working with the Liberty Justice Center. Her son, a freshman in high school, has been struggling with remote learning. “We heard about their work and reached out,” Rhodes told The Intercept. “They’re helping us in an effort, and we need their help. They’re putting the unions on notice that if they do something illegal, go on protest, have a sick day, we’re going to sue.”

In Fairfax County, the school board voted Tuesday to bring all students back for hybrid learning next month, beginning on March 16. The teachers union has indicated it wants to wait until all staff have received their second dose of a Covid-19 vaccine; 65 percent of staff have so far received their first dose. In Chicago, the school district has been trying to bring back K-8 students to the classroom, though currently has no plan or timeline for high schoolers.

Different parent groups have different goals for what reopening schools would look like, and multiple parent groups sometimes exist within the same city. Cristy Hudson, a mother of three in Fairfax who helped launch a grassroots group, Open Fairfax County Public Schools, over the summer, told The Intercept while they’re glad the school board is moving forward with reopenings, they’d like to see “a pretty quick expansion to kids back in school five days a week.” Another parent group, the Open FCPS Coalition, is currently focused on recall efforts of school board members they believe have delayed in-person learning too long. A new parent group that formed in January, the Chicago Parents Collective, says it’s pushing for clarity and commitments on reopening. “Let’s take baby steps, none of this is going to be perfect, we recognize that,” Ryan Griffin, a parent member, said in a local radio interview. “But we cannot let this pursuit of perfect get in the way of making some incremental progress on the education of our children.”

Other conservative organizations are capitalizing on parent frustrations with school closures to further political goals around weakening labor unions and public education. Since March, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank in D.C., has been urging state and federal lawmakers to push private school vouchers and new subsidies for homeschooling in light of the pandemic. And this year, a wave of new private school voucher bills have been introduced in over 15 states across the country, with lawmakers hoping to advance the policies with less public resistance than they might typically face.

Jennifer Berkshire, a journalist who monitors education privatization efforts, says the school reopening debates have fascinated her, as they’ve activated a group of parents that school choice groups have historically struggled to mobilize.

“Many of these upset parents are in elite suburban districts who paid a lot of money to move specifically to those communities for those public schools,” she said. “They’re not the families who have historically embraced school choice and defunding schools.” Berkshire notes that State Policy Network affiliates have “seen the anger of those parents as something that can be weaponized” and have stepped in to offer themselves as a resource.

“It’s not a coincidence that you’re seeing these huge proposed voucher expansions now in all these different states,” Berkshire added. “And I think their hope is to basically mobilize parents who’ve never been interested before, or at least there will be less opposition.”

Charles Siler, a former lobbyist for the libertarian think tank Goldwater Institute, says conservative groups have been looking for new ways during the pandemic to drive a wedge between parents and their individual schools. Parents typically give their own schools high marks in public opinion surveys, even if they have broader critiques about the public education system writ large. A 2019 national survey by the educator professional association Phi Delta Kappa found 76 percent of parents gave their own child’s school an A or B grade. A Gallup poll released in August found K-12 parents’ satisfaction with their child’s education fell 10 percentage points from a year earlier, though it still stood at 72 percent.

While it might seem counterintuitive to have conservative organizations fighting to get students back into the very traditional public schools they typically rail against, Siler says, hastening teacher returns can also help advance conservative movement goals of accelerating staff departures from the public school system altogether.

“If you force teachers to return to work in an unsafe environment, especially when safe alternatives exist, a lot of teachers will retire early or choose to not renew their contracts,” he said. “Fewer people will also want to become teachers because they see what’s happening, the lack of funding and respect. This exploitative assault could cripple public education for decades.”

An American Federation of Teachers national survey conducted in August and September found one-third of educators say the pandemic has made them more likely to leave teaching earlier than they planned.

Berkshire, the education journalist, says while making the teaching profession less attractive is certainly part of the “long game” of the conservative movement, another objective is to use the pandemic and the associated teacher shortages to advance bills that remove teacher licensing requirements. Ending or easing occupational licensing is something long-sought by education reformers and opposed by teacher unions.

In July, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in D.C., urged states to waive their teacher licensing requirements to more quickly facilitate in-person learning. “These regulatory barriers and other concerns could hinder efforts to reopen schools,” he argued. A few months later, a fellow with the Empire Center for Public Policy, a right-wing think tank in New York, proposed “relaxing or abolishing teacher preparation program requirements” as well as easing certification rules to “invite more competition for teaching jobs.”

Shaun Richman, the program director of the Harry Van Arsdale Jr. School of Labor Studies at SUNY Empire State College, says the current distrust undergirding battles to get reluctant teachers back into the classroom is the result of years of hostile treatment from policymakers and administrators.

“Decades of union-busting attacks on teachers unions, under the guise of ‘education reform’ with the cynical manipulation of ‘civil rights’ and ‘student success’ rhetoric, have utterly destroyed the trust necessary to get school districts like Chicago to return to any form of face-to-face instruction during this actual crisis,” he said. “Anyone who’s serious about getting the buy-in from teachers that’s necessary [for reopening] needs to shun and denounce the [former Trump Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos and Janus crowd.”

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A Small Chicago Firm Has Quietly Funded Nearly Two Dozen Anti-Union Lawsuits

Originally published in The Intercept on December 23, 2019.
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A lawyer who filed 21 class-action lawsuits against unions over the last two years has previously said that his lawsuits were not part of any concerted effort to target public-sector unions and that “the idea to bring these lawsuits was entirely my own.” It turns out, however, that his lawsuits are backed by a small finance litigation firm in Chicago, according to a court filing that has not been previously reported. The firm, Juris Capital, is in the business of bankrolling litigation upfront, making bets that it will enjoy an ample cut of a plaintiff’s proceeds.

Attorney Jonathan Mitchell filed his lawsuits in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Maryland, California, and Washington state in the weeks and months before the Supreme Court issued its decision in Janus v. AFCSME, a case that significantly weakened public-sector unions.

In its landmark Janus ruling, the Supreme Court said in June 2018 that public-sector unions cannot collect fees from workers who do not wish to be union members. The court deemed unconstitutional a longstanding practice of unions charging so-called agency fees to workers who did not opt to join a union but benefited from its bargaining nonetheless.

Mitchell’s litigation seeks hundreds of millions of dollars in retroactive payments from public-sector unions, refunds on behalf of workers ideologically opposed to ever having paid any union agency fees. Most states have two- to three-year statutes of limitations on these kinds of suits, while Minnesota’s goes back six years. In the immediate aftermath of the Janus decision, conservative legal foundations — including the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Buckeye Institute, and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation — also filed similar lawsuits.

At the time of his initial court filings, Mitchell also had a pending nomination by President Donald Trump to serve as chair of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a federal agency dedicated to improving government administration. Tapping Mitchell, a former visiting professor at Stanford Law School and before that the Texas solicitor general, to lead the nonpartisan agency rankled some, as he had a long conservative legal record. (Mitchell’s nomination, which was not approved by the full Senate, was returned to the White House at the end of the last Congress, and he was not renominated this year.)

Mitchell’s law firm that brought the anti-union lawsuits, Mitchell Law PLLC, was registered in June 2018 — the same month as the Janus ruling. A month later, Noam Scheiber of the New York Times looked at Mitchell’s involvement in the lawsuits, writing that it suggested “a well-coordinated effort.” Mitchell declined Scheiber’s request to discuss the matter, citing his pending nomination “and my desire not to draw attention to the lawsuits.” Nobody knew who funded the work of Mitchell Law.

Not for lack of trying. Also in July 2018, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Mitchell, expressing his concern that the lawyer might be part of the same “coordinated, covert, and well-funded” effort to crush public-sector unions that led to the Janus ruling. Whitehouse requested, among other things, a list of all “persons or entities that have provided funding for or have a financial interest, including contingency interests” in the outcome of his post-Janus lawsuits, as well as details on how he identified plaintiffs for his suits.

In his response letter, Mitchell wrote that he “can assure you that I am not part of any ‘campaign’ or coordinated effort to litigate against public employee unions.” He claimed that the idea to “bring these lawsuits was entirely my own, and it was not made in conjunction or coordination with the Janus litigants or any of the entities that you mention in your letter.” He declined to share who was funding the litigation, citing attorney-client and “attorney-work product” privilege, but insisted that there was nothing covert about his efforts.

Thirteen months later, Mitchell had to file a rare disclosure form, providing information about his lawsuits that he’d never before had to share publicly. This was thanks to a rule in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California that requires mandatory disclosure of third-party funding agreements for class-action lawsuits.

In a filing dated August 13, 2019, Mitchell disclosed that “Juris Capital LLC has provided a non-recourse loan” to his law firm and that the “loan is to be repaid with the proceeds that Michell Law PLLC receives from any of the approximately 20 class-action lawsuits that the firm has brought against public-sector unions in the wake of Janus, including this case.” In sum, he concluded, “Juris Capital LLC therefore has a ‘financial interest in the subject matter in controversy.’”

Reached by phone, Mitchell declined to comment.

JURIS CAPITAL IS a decade-old privately held litigation finance firm incorporated in Chicago. Headed by David Desser, a self-described “pioneer in the commercial litigation finance industry,” Juris is one of just a few litigation finance firms in the U.S that provide upfront funding for pending litigation and take a cut of the plaintiff’s settlement or jury award. Desser once told the New York Times that overall, “our returns are well in excess of 20 percent per year” and that “we’re certainly beating the market.” While Juris is not required to identify its funders, media reports have previously described it as “backed by two hedge funds” and “a group of dedicated investors.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, blasted Juris for hiding its donors.

“While labor unions are forced to publicly disclose nearly every financial transaction they make, those plotting our demise hide behind front groups to plow dark money into bad-faith lawsuits that tie up union resources and hurt working people,” she told The Intercept. “It’s well past time that Juris is exposed for what it is: a dark-money vehicle trying to deny workers a voice at work and in our democracy.”

The AFT lost 84,500 agency-fee payers immediately after the Janus ruling, though it added another 88,000 members between November 2017 and November 2018. Many conservative groups have been running campaigns since June 2018 encouraging public-sector union members to disaffiliate altogether.

In many ways, the cases being filed against public-sector unions appear quite unusual compared to the kinds of cases Juris and other finance litigation firms typically invest in. Generally finance litigation firms look for low-profile cases, in which the chances of winning or settling are high, so as to prioritize quick, reliable returns.

In 2010, Desser described his firm’s approach like this: “We are cherry-picking the absolute best cases with a fact pattern that we can deconstruct. We’re not interested in winning 1 out of 10 like in the venture capital world, where you look for that home run. … We want to win 7 out of 10, with doubles or triples on our money.” Desser did not return The Intercept’s requests for comment.

So far, the wave of post-Janus lawsuits, both those led by Mitchell and those led by conservative legal foundations, have not yet proved successful, as trial courts across the country have unanimously accepted unions’ arguments in roughly 25 cases that they were acting in good faith prior to Janus and therefore, should not be held responsible for funding the agency fees charged prior to last year’s Supreme Court decision. In some cases though, unions have settled rather than take all the legal challenges through court. A spokesperson for the National Right to Work Foundation told Bloomberg Law in late November that the organization has settled 10 cases and recovered tens of thousands of dollars in agency fees.

While unions have so far had success in the lower courts, the post-Janus litigation is now moving onto the appellate level, where their fortunes could change. In November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit became the first federal appeals court to endorse this “good-faith” argument in favor of unions, but six more appellate courts are set to decide on the issue soon. As Robert Iafolla noted recently in Bloomberg Law, “A single circuit ruling that rejects [this argument] would create a split that may pave the way for the issue to reach the Supreme Court.”

“I think in most cases, a finance litigation firm’s hope would be to not go to the Supreme Court, as that means it would be a case that is getting dragged on for years and years,” said Charles Agee, founder and CEO of Westfleet Advisors, a finance litigation consulting firm. “I think most litigation funders hope their cases settle before going to trial.”

Another possibility — though this, too, would be unusual — is that the lawsuits are being waged primarily to drain union coffers in defense. “Juris and others know that if you entangle unions in endless litigation, you can begin to starve our resources,” Weingarten of the AFT said. From this perspective, it’s a win-win for the plaintiffs — either they win and the investors take home profits, or they lose but the unions are still on the hook for hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal defense fees. One example lawyers point to of this sort of strategy is billionaire investor Peter Thiel backing a series of lawsuits against Gawker Media, including a case brought by Hulk Hogan, which ultimately bankrupted the company. Thiel described his investments as “one of my greater philanthropic things that I’ve done.”

Gary Chodes, who has worked in the litigation finance world for the last 15 years, told The Intercept that it would be really difficult to find out who was funding the post-Janus cases, though he has indeed seen some “politically oriented” lawsuits over the years. For example, he said, conservative-leaning think tanks supported Texas ranchers in lawsuits in which local governments used eminent domain to take away cattle ranchers’ water rights.

“Are those cases that will generate a lot of interest from the legal funding industry? No, they’re probably not economical winners,” he said. “But they’re important philosophical battles.”

Will Baude, a libertarian law professor who defended union agency fees as constitutional, told the New York Times that he would expect the Supreme Court to be less sympathetic to “good-faith” defenses than lower courts. “If I were the unions, I’d be really nervous,” he said.

Some of the post-Janus cases are also challenging the legal principle of exclusive representation, in which a union represents all workers in a unit if a majority of the unit endorses it. The majority rule principle is written into the National Labor Relations Act, and Catherine Fisk, an expert on labor law at the University of California, Berkeley told The Intercept that it would be “an extraordinary feat of judicial activism” if the Supreme Court struck that down.

Scott Barton, a spokesperson for Pacific Legal Foundation, told The Intercept that the law firm filed one post-Janus case in California this past summer but “have had no involvement with Jonathan Mitchell or his cases.” Lisa Gates, a spokesperson for the Buckeye Institute, told The Intercept that the think tank is involved in four cases (two in Ohio, one in Minnesota, and one in Maine) and “are not working with Jonathan Mitchell on any cases.” A spokesperson from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation did not return requests for comment, though Mitchell told Whitehouse in 2018 that he was not working with them.

Asked about Juris Capital and whether he believes that Mitchell was sufficiently forthright during his nomination process, Whitehouse told The Intercept, “Jonathan Mitchell has a thriving anti-union law practice that appears to be an arm of the corporate donor campaign that gave us Janus v. AFSCME. The corporate interests behind that anti-worker campaign don’t want the public to see what they’re up to, but nominees for important federal posts need to tell the truth to Congress.”

Amid Conservative Assault on Organized Labor, Democratic Lawmakers Are Advancing Laws to Expand Workers’ Rights

Originally published in The Intercept on August 5, 2019.
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PUBLIC-SECTOR EMPLOYEES IN states with Democratic majorities have made significant legislative gains in recent months, despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2018 decision in Janus v. AFSCME, which found that unions could no longer collect bargaining fees from workers who do not pay membership dues.

More than 22,000 state workers in Nevada and Delaware gained the right to collectively bargain this year thanks to recently passed legislation. Colorado, home to more than 26,000 state employees, is expected to follow suit next year.

With Nevada and Delaware’s new legislation, passed this summer, there are now 26 states that recognize state employee bargaining rights, as do Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, according to a spokesperson for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME. Twenty-four states either outright prohibit collective bargaining or do not authorize meaningful bargaining, such as Wisconsin, which heavily curtailed the ability of public-sector employees to negotiate in 2011.

On the federal level, congressional representatives are also working to bolster the rights of public-sector workers, though any chance of enacting legislation is highly unlikely unless Democrats win the White House and the Senate and maintain their hold on the House of Representatives in 2020. On June 25, Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, and Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Penn., reintroduced the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act, which would, for the first time, set a minimum nationwide standard of collective bargaining rights for the nation’s 17.3 million public employees. Among other things, public employees would be required to recognize their workers’ unions if they’re “freely chosen” by a majority vote, and employers would be required to bargain with workers over wages, hours, and other terms of employment. If public employers refuse, then the legislation grants the federal government the authority to intervene.

The bill is backed by 2020 presidential candidates, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Cory Booker.

This legislative push comes as organized labor was bracing for the worst following the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which was expected to significantly deplete union coffers. In its 5-4 decision, the court struck down more than four decades of legal precedent and concluded that unions could no longer collect payments from non-dues-paying members in exchange for collective bargaining services. This opened the door not only for nonmembers to stop paying fees, but also for union members themselves to opt out altogether.

While the full extent of Janus’s blow to the labor movement may not be felt for several years, at a labor conference in February, public-sector union leaders said the first year’s impact had been less devastating to membership than expected. AFSCME President Lee Saunders said that while his union had lost 100,000 agency-fee payers since the court’s June decision, they had also managed to flip 310,000 agency-fee payers into dues-paying members. “For every member that we lost, we gained seven,” Saunders declared. Other unions reported relatively minimal losses, like the American Federation of Teachers, which lost 84,500 agency-fee payers after Janus, but also gained 88,000 new members between November 2017 and November 2018.

Still, many experts say the drop-off in membership could happen slowly, rather than an immediately significant decline. Michigan, which became a right-to-work state in 2012, has lost nearly 130,000 union members over the last seven years, or 16 percent of union membership. This year, Michigan unions have reported at least $20 million less in revenue than they did in 2012.

There’s also the risk that unions will have trouble recruiting new members moving forward. Mike Antonucci, a teachers union analyst, said recently that “current members are unlikely to resign in any great numbers. Over time, however, they will retire. The burden will be on the unions to recruit new members in the same percentages as they enjoyed pre-Janus.” The National Education Association saw a 0.5 percent increase in its membership compared to the year before, Antonucci found; however, New York accounted for 80 percent of that nationwide growth. By contrast, 10 state affiliates saw membership drops of 3 percent or more, including North Carolina, which saw a 6.8 percent drop in 2018.

IN THE FACE of the conservative assault on organized labor, workers and lawmakers in blue states are experimenting with new laws and forms of organizing to make it easier to unionize and negotiate on the job.

In Nevada, Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak, signed a bill in June granting Nevada’s more than 20,000 state workers the right to collectively bargain, a right they’ve been denied since 1965. Sisolak, who was elected in 2018, pledged in his first State of the State address in February to get this legislation passed. His election placed the state government fully in Democratic control for the first time since 1992.

According to AFSCME, the legislation marks the largest expansion of collective bargaining for state workers anywhere in the country in the past 16 years. It benefits a broad swath of workers, including nurses, caretakers, and correction officers.

Conservative opponents of the bill argued that granting collective bargaining rights to state workers would hurt taxpayers and Nevada’s budget, even though there is little empirical evidence in support of that assertion. Local government workers in Nevada have been able to collectively bargain since 1969.

According to researchers at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, state employees in Nevada earn between 1 and 13 percent less than their private-sector peers in total compensation, and their health care benefits are less generous compared to state workers in other parts of the country. Workers who advocated in Carson City for the legislation, however, went to great lengths to say that it was not just about wages and benefits, but also things like working conditions and safety. Rick McCann, head of the Nevada Association of Public Safety Officers, said for example that now his members can bargain over things like body-worn cameras and dashcams.

In order to get the bill passed, Nevada workers had to make some concessions. The legislation includes an amendment that grants lawmakers and the governor the final say over things like pay raises, regardless of what the workers negotiate. Compromises like this are common for public-sector unions. Still, labor leaders say that even having a seat at the table will be a huge step forward, and they will push for improvements to the law in the years ahead, if necessary.

Workers saw similar success this year in Delaware, where Democratic Gov. John Carney signed a bill in June granting collective bargaining rights to more than 2,000 state employees.

Since signing the law, state workers in Delaware have already begun to organize new unions. In late July, 340 workers at the Delaware Department of Motor Vehicles voted to form a union for the first time. They are joining Laborers’ International Union of North America Local 1029. Additionally, according to Michael Begatto, executive director of Council 81 AFSCME AFL-CIO in Delaware, dietary workers at the Delaware Veterans Home just voted to join AFSCME, and workers at the Office of the State Fire Marshal recently filed for an election.

Delaware Democrats have had a governing trifecta since 2009, but in the past, state workers faced “a reluctance” by some lawmakers and individuals in the executive office, Begatto said, noting that Gov. John Carney’s election in 2016 worked in their favor. “They balked at being able to go to the table as equals with workers,” he said. “This governor was more understanding; without him, this would not have happened.”

Unions in the state saw less of a decline in membership post-Janus than they had been expecting. “We were pleasantly surprised, as we were expecting a 20 to 25 percent reduction,” Begatto said. “Out of 7,000 members, we had only about 180 members opt-out.”

COLORADO WILL LIKELY be the next state to expand bargaining rights to state employees.

In this year’s legislative session, lawmakers in Colorado came close to achieving collective bargaining rights for its roughly 26,500 state employees, but the bill came to a halt because Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, who was elected last year, said he wanted more time to figure out how it would work in practice. In 2007, Colorado’s then-Democratic governor issued an executive order giving state workers the right to form a union, but not to collectively bargain. This bill would have codified and expanded that order.

Hilary Glasgow, executive director of Colorado Workers for Innovative and New Solutions, the state employee union, told The Intercept that she’s confident the bill will be passed in the next session.

“We know Governor Polis believes in collective bargaining, so where we’re at is him needing to understand all the ins and outs of what this means and how it can benefit not only the state and state employees, but also the citizens we serve in Colorado,” she said. “We’re going to be meeting regularly, as much as it takes, as often as it takes, to get to a place where we can introduce a bill on the first day of the next session that the governor and the union are behind.”

Glasgow and Polis released a joint statement at the end of April pledging to “enter into discussions to address outstanding issues surrounding House Bill 1273 and other issues affecting the state workforce and the people of Colorado that cannot be resolved in the few remaining days that exist in the legislative session.” The statement adds that “we are confident that we will successfully resolve these outstanding issues before the 2020 legislative session.”

Polis’s office declined to comment beyond the April statement.

Glasgow said collective bargaining rights are an important factor in addressing the state’s staffing crisis, which has escalated since 2009. A report published by the Economic Analysis and Research Network, a Colorado WINS partner, finds over the last decade that turnover among state employees increased by 73 percent. Colorado’s Department of Personnel reported last June that roughly one in every five positions in the state government was vacant. The high number of vacancies can place additional strain and responsibility on the workers who remain. A number of research studies support the idea that collective bargaining can help to reduce employee turnover.

“We’re seeing a steady decline in state workers and an alarming increase in vacancies,” Glasgow said. “We’re running roughly 10 percent behind the private sector on their total compensation plan, and what I think people don’t understand about state services is that a lot of them are highly dangerous behind-the-scenes work. There is expertise at the front-line level that can inform how they do their work in a way that makes it safer and better.”

The push for collective bargaining, Glasgow said, is rooted in a desire to make sure that this firsthand knowledge is taken seriously. “Workers need to have a venue to have those conversations so changes in their workplace can actually be implemented,” she said. “Right now, you’re at the benevolence of the governor and the cabinet as to whether they’ll hear you out.”