We demand that you immediately recognize the Connexion Workers Coalition (CWC) union. We demand that you bargain with the CWC in good faith. We demand that you rescind the Return-To-Office (RTO) mandate that motivated Connexion tech support workers to begin organizing in the first place. We demand that you cease all partnerships with union-busting or “union avoidance” firms. Finally, we demand that you formalize a framework whereby future unions may seek recognition.

To organize one’s workplace and form a union to bargain for better wages, benefits, and working conditions is a fundamental right of workers; for many American workers, this right has been codified in federal law for nearly a century. The State of Colorado has now affirmed, through the Protections for Public Workers Act (PROPWA), that these rights should extend to public sector workers as well. Though PROPWA does not define an obligation for an employer to recognize or bargain with an employee union, we believe that you are delaying the inevitable by refusing to recognize the CWC.

By refusing to bargain with the CWC, you are flouting the City’s own espoused values of Belonging and Partnership, and you are communicating to those unionized workers that you do not care about their many stated grievances. Further, you are communicating to prospective employees that you are not the competitive employer that you claim to be. You harm your workforce by refusing to acknowledge their union efforts and to bargain with them. One way that the City can show good faith in bargaining with the CWC is by rescinding the extremely unpopular RTO mandate which was aimed squarely at the tech support team. RTO does nothing to improve workplace culture, and, on the contrary, often serves as a means to make workers quit, or to boost managerial control over workers while simultaneously negatively impacting worker productivity. Connexion managers have cited insipid and shallow reasons like “culture” and “business needs” for enforcing RTO. Meanwhile, Connexion workers have offered dozens of reasons for why RTO is not in the interest of their team or Connexion as a whole, or their customers, citing actual City values such as Sustainability and Safety & Wellbeing, to which their managers have given no responses. Connexion management, and the City leaders who support them, demonstrate that they do not care about the actual City values when they steadfastly implement RTO despite the numerous objections from CWC workers. The City values, then, take on a purely perfunctory character.

We believe that it is an objectionable use of taxpayer dollars to pay union-busting firms to train City managers on how to avoid unions. In November 2023, the City paid $6900 to Employers Council Services for a series of in-person and virtual trainings originally titled “Creating a Culture and Workplace that Doesn’t Need Unions @ City of Fort Collins”. It is unclear how much money was spent thereafter to send City managers to these trainings. What is clear is that Employers Council, formerly known as Mountain States Employers Council, has been union-busting for about as long as the National Labor Relations Act has been in existence; their website advertises “anti-union campaigns aimed at preserving union-free status”. City leaders may swear that they don’t intend to union-bust, but this assurance is belied by their refusal to recognize unions, their refusal to bargain, their conscious attrition of unionized Connexion staff, their constant flux of new policies aimed at Connexion tech support workers, and their pecuniary relationship with Employers Council. The City can and should do better.

City workers will unionize regardless of whether you recognize their union, and the refusal to recognize their union will only produce unnecessary friction. If, with input from your workers and community, you were to formalize a framework whereby City unions may be recognized, this would result in greater comity between teams and reduced ambiguity concerning the path forward for other workers who might choose to unionize in the future. More and more American workers are choosing to organize their workplaces each year, and the enactment of PROPWA means that more and more City of Fort Collins workers will be doing the same. You have the opportunity to prove to the world that you are indeed an exceptional employer, and that you truly value your workers and, by extension, the services they provide to their community.

Thank you.
Connexion Workers Coalition (CWC)