Dec 6, 2007 5:03 PM
Now that the Colorado governor has issued his long-promised executive order allowing some 32,000 state workers the right to form bargaining groups, the AFT is joining two other unions in a joint effort called Colorado WINS to organize and represent those workers. The acronym WINS stands for Workers for Innovative and New Solutions, and the AFT partners the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the Colorado Association of Public Employees, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union are hoping that the legal right to represent workers in bargaining will swell their ranks. Currently, the three unions claim just 4,500 active state workers as members, though they represent more than 17,000 active members overall in Colorado. Until the recent executive order, state unions had no collective-bargaining rights and were limited to functioning as advocacy groups for members.
Whats best for public employees is for all of us to be part of Colorado WINS, said David Sanger, president of the American Federation of Teachers in Colorado.
The combined effort was also expected to eliminate the kind of labor union free-for-alls that occurred in Illinois and other states when legislatures agreed to collective bargaining for state workers and rival unions competed against each other in an effort to recruit new members.
That still could happen, as leaders of the Colorado Federation of Public Employees who are now pressing to disaffiliate from the AFT along with the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Communications Workers announced they would also organize workers, but not in tandem with the WINS coalition.
Competition or no, workers must still vote to join a union and a particular union must get more than 50 percent of the vote to became the designated representative.
Denver Post, Nov. 16
Rocky Mountain News, Nov. 15