Union efforts spreading across Boulder County

A group of Boulder County public employees has filed for a union election, citing job security, turnover and work-life balance as reasons. The county employs over 2,000 people.

“Boulder County workers continue to show up fearlessly for the community through natural disasters, the pandemic, the opioid epidemic, and the affordable housing crisis. We fight daily for racial equity, accessibility, and more robust services for residents,” said Brianna Barber, an organizing committee member with the Boulder County Employees Union, in a news release this week.

The workers are represented by Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 7. The petition for election was filed with the state under a 2022 Colorado collective bargaining law. The Colorado Department of Labor and Employment is expected to work with the employees to set the dates and method of the election.

Separately, ski patrollers at Eldora are also seeking to form a union. In late March, the patrollers voted 29-3 to unionize. They are seeking changes to the overtime pay structure and health care benefits upon hiring, among other requests. Currently, they must work two seasons and 700 hours before receiving health care, they have said. They also want increased access to bathrooms on the mountain. Some patrollers had been trying for more than a year to form the union.

“Ski Patrol is a skilled profession requiring advanced certifications and precise knowledge of mountain specifics, yet workers in the industry are routinely undervalued and their professional work environment and safety disregarded,” states the mission statement by the Eldora Professional Ski Patrol Association.

Eldora and the owner of the resort, Powdr, a Utah-based company, are challenging the union election results. An Eldora spokesperson cited “improper conduct” as one reason for the challenge. The spokesperson told Boulder Reporting Lab that the election results did not include ballots from volunteer ski patrollers. The ski patrollers are represented by the United Professional Ski Patrols of America, which is affiliated with Communications Workers of America (CWA) District 7.