Organizing for Collective Bargaining in Colorado

This article is part of a series, "Expanding Union Rights in Public Higher Education."

Colorado labor law with respect to faculty collective bargaining at public colleges and universities should be easier to understand. If we lived in an antiunion state, professors would face nearly insurmountable odds when organizing labor unions. In Colorado, we have the right to organize—a right the state legislature recently clari­fied. Colorado law is silent, however, on the question of whether professors have the right to bargain with the state. In practice, this means that we can organize all we want, but without enabling legislation, our administra­tions have the legal right to ignore us.

In 2022, the AAUP and the AFT participated in a broad effort to change Colorado law to for­mally recognize the right of faculty members to bargain collectively like many other state workers. Despite having a Democratic governor and Democratic majorities in both houses of the state legislature, that effort failed because the academic labor movement couldn’t agree on which compromises we would accept in order to convince Governor Jared Polis to sign the legislation. As a result, a version of a bill that included college and university faculty never came to a floor vote.

Despite this failure, in 2023 the state legislature passed a bill that reenforced the organizing rights of many employees, including professors. For example, as the official summary of that law explains, we can now “engage in protected, concerted activity for the purpose of mutual aid or protection,” as well as “organize, form, join, or assist an employee organi­zation.” The passage of this bill demonstrates that Colorado is not a red state: The majority of state legislators and the majority of voters support the idea of workers forming unions, and nothing in Colorado law prevents professors at public colleges and universi­ties from organizing. Indeed, public school teachers in cities like Pueblo and Denver don’t need enabling legislation to negotiate contracts with school districts because their membership is so strong already.

That’s why AAUP and AFT organizers have been assisting AAUP chapters across the state as they increase their membership in anticipation of the day when collective bargaining arrives. As a result of these efforts, the Colorado AAUP conference has grown from 248 to 372 members in the last two years. Even that figure is not reflective of our true strength because AAUP chapters have won friends across Colorado thanks to our increasing activity on campuses ever since the pandemic began. With the help of AAUP and AFT organizers, we will grow even more in the future.

For example, my chapter at Colorado State Univer­sity–Pueblo has grown from just seven to around fifty members (out of approximately three hundred faculty members total) over the course of the last three years. Our chapter has added members by focusing almost exclusively on raising the low salaries at our university. From adjuncts to tenured professors at our business school, nobody makes a market rate. In 2022, when the administration offered a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment, we issued a public statement demanding an 8 percent raise. The administration increased the size of that raise by 2 percent the very next day.

The CSUP AAUP chapter began the 2023–24 aca­demic year by conducting a survey regarding economic security among the faculty. Our vice president, Heidi Reynolds-Stenson, ran the survey in conjunction with the faculty senate. Both the statistics and the personal stories were shocking. Here are just the first three find­ings, quoted directly from the executive summary:

• 93% of CSUP Faculty have found it necessary to supplement their salary in some way since begin­ning work at CSUP.
• Less than half (45%) of CSUP faculty could cover 3 months of expenses by any means (including bor­rowing money, selling assets, etc.) if they lost their primary income. This level of economic insecurity is higher than the national average for U.S. adults (30%).
• Less than half (43%) of CSUP faculty would cover an unexpected $400 expense using cash or money in the bank. Most would need to go into debt or sell assets to cover it and some would still be unable to cover it through even these means.

A story about the survey appeared in the local newspaper, and ever since the survey’s release we have used its findings to argue for better salaries at every possible juncture. As a result, in the 2024–25 aca­demic year, nearly all tenured and tenure-track faculty are getting a $4,500 raise, and our lecturers are getting an additional $1,800.

At the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs, the AAUP chapter has worked closely with the faculty senate, especially on budget issues. In May 2023, the chapter raised money through a GoFundMe campaign to hire the well-known accounting professor and AAUP stalwart Howard Bunsis to perform a forensic analysis of the university’s budget. He found that the administra­tion’s suggestion of a pending budget crisis was wildly overblown, that the university’s budgetary priorities con­sistently neglect academic needs, and that administrative salaries have grown at nearly twice the rate of salaries for professors. After presenting this information to packed meetings across campus, the chapter has significantly raised its profile and has taken on a much greater role in the governance of that university.

At Front Range Community College, located outside of Denver, the AAUP chapter, with help from the AFT, has developed a multiyear plan to increase faculty power. In just the last two years, the chapter has grown from nine to forty-three members. A nine-person organizing committee is working on implementing the plan, and a part-time organizer has been devoted entirely to helping the chapter grow. The Colorado Community College System is very large, and even though it is well-funded compared with other systems around the country, its terms of employment are particularly exploitative. Therefore, the example that the FRCC AAUP is setting will become increasingly important as our campaign progresses.

Faculty in Colorado are going to need collective bargaining sooner rather than later because of the ongoing shared governance crisis in our state. In 2021, the state legislature quietly passed a law that allowed universities to exempt presidential searches from our public disclosure laws. Nearly every presidential search at the state’s public colleges or universities has been conducted in secret since then. Some of these searches have been conducted with no faculty input whatsoever. All over Colorado, we have gone from having multiple candidates visiting campuses and talk­ing to faculty to having only sole finalists announced and then appointed, with little or no discussion.

Faculty participation in presidential searches can be somewhat pro forma even when the search is open, of course, but we’ve found that this change is indicative of a new hostility toward faculty participa­tion in university governance generally. Presidents or chancellors who know that they owe their jobs entirely to their governing boards have abandoned real shared governance after taking office. More and more frequently, administrators inform faculty governance bodies of decisions only after they have been made and then gaslight them by arguing that they continue to recognize traditional shared governance as the AAUP defines it. For example, at Colorado Moun­tain College, the administration’s response to faculty concerns over a presidential search that lasted weeks rather than months was to claim that an internal hire without a public search is consistent with the idea of shared governance. Presidents have also become a lot less responsive to faculty inquiries about university issues in general, which suggests that changes in the presidential selection process are the beginning of the end of meaningful shared governance in Colorado.

The Colorado AAUP conference is now planning to remind every public university board in the state that traditional presidential selection methods remain open to them as new presidential vacancies open. We also recognize that shaming administrators will help achieve some goals more than others, and the advan­tages to boards of having pliant presidents will likely long outlive whatever temporary embarrassment we can inflict upon boards.

That’s why the best counter to the shared gover­nance crisis in Colorado is to keep organizing. The law is a good tool in this effort, but we don’t need enabling legislation in order to organize. Thanks to the legal protection we have for organizing under Colorado law, some chapters have already been able to win better salaries and other concessions through the strength of our numbers, even without a contract. When our chapters become large enough, we will use the power of collective action to bargain collectively even if the state legislature hasn’t passed enabling legislation by then.

In the meantime, our administrators keep mak­ing the case through their actions for faculty to join our AAUP chapters. As we fight in the short term for better pay in the absence of collective bargaining, we argue that we can get even more from our adminis­trations if more faculty members join our chapters. I would liken the state of our campaign in Colorado to the early days of the Starbucks unionization campaign. When people began to join unions in stores across the country, the company began to grant concessions to diminish the incentives for other workers to sign up. Instead of achieving the company’s aim, more workers joined the union because those concessions were insuf­ficient. An extra 2 percent for a one-time cost-of-living increase is better than nothing, but it is not enough, so our movement will only continue to grow.

The Colorado AAUP is pioneering the transition from a collection of influential advocacy chapters to a beacon of faculty organizing in a region of the country where faculty collective bargaining is rare. We are a rich state with a storied higher education system, but the nominal liberals who run our universities have absorbed the neoliberal idea that university faculty are interchangeable cogs in a machine that could run on cheap labor forever if tradition didn’t stand in the way. While many of us managed to get by until the pandemic, that catastrophe exposed the economic pre­carity of faculty at all levels of employment at public colleges and universities across the state. When the race to the bottom began to accelerate, we stepped up our organizing campaign.

Right now, despite the quirks of its labor law, Colorado is almost certainly the bluest state in the United States that doesn’t have any faculty collective bargaining. The Colorado AAUP has already laid the foundations to bring faculty collective bargaining to the state, and I think it will come much sooner than most people expect.

Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University–Pueblo. A former two-term member of the AAUP’s national Council and former copresident of the Colorado AAUP conference, he is currently the president of the AAUP chapter at CSU–Pueblo.