Last month, two University of Colorado regents announced their intention to bring forward a plan to expand collective bargaining rights to CU faculty, staff and student workers. The announcement kicked off what will be a monthslong conversation between regents, unions and the broader university community about whether and how collective bargaining should apply across CU campuses.
“This is about starting a really important conversation,” said at-large Regent Elliot Hood, one of the regents involved and a former unionized schoolteacher.
“I’ve talked to a lot of people in the CU system who believe that they’re not being compensated fairly, they’re being compensated inconsistently [or] that they don’t have an essential or a real voice in the workplace based on their job category. I’m a firm believer in collective bargaining rights as a means of solving those problems.”
Hood has not yet formally introduced a proposal and said the board will not vote on the issue until June. He made his plans public early, he said, because he “wanted to give all stakeholders involved sufficient time to know that this is coming.”
United Campus Workers Colorado is using that time to press regents to support the plan, including during public comment at a full Board of Regents meeting at CU Boulder on Feb. 5.
“A lot of us will be attending,” said Jessica Ellis, president of United Campus Workers Colorado, which represents CU and CSU employees. “We’ve gotten public support from three regents now, so we wanted to show support for the policy and speak on its utility and what it would mean to workers.”
Regent Ilana Spiegel, who represents District 6, a densely populated district southeast of Denver, is co-sponsoring the proposal with Hood, and Regent Wanda James, who represents District 1, which contains most of Denver, has also voiced public support for expanding collective bargaining. The policy would need the support of at least two more of the nine regents to pass in June. This could be reached if all five Democratic regents, including Boulder’s Regent Callie Rennison and Regent Nolbert Chavez of District 7, support the measure.
The proposal has also been endorsed by Rep. Junie Joseph and Boulder City Councilmember Nicole Speer, whose position at CU Boulder was eliminated last year amid federal funding cuts under the Trump administration.
What the union wants from collective bargaining
Currently only “classified staff” at CU – those designated as state employees – have collective bargaining rights through the statewide union Colorado WINS.
United Campus Workers Colorado wants those rights extended to faculty, staff and student workers. The union has pushed for that change for years and launched its most recent campaign last November. Ellis described collective bargaining for university workers as a “regular working-class issue.”
“The workers at the University of Colorado are all taxpayers. We are students in the classrooms. We’re patients in our own clinics, a lot of the time,” she said.
Through collective bargaining, UCW hopes to negotiate over pay, working conditions, hybrid work policies, teaching loads for faculty, patient loads for clinical workers, and clearer processes for filing and resolving grievances.
Faculty at CU are also pushing for a “Mutual Academic Defense Compact” among Colorado universities to pool resources to push back against what they describe as growing federal threats to higher education funding and independence.
“Higher education is under unprecedented attack by the Trump administration right now,” said Chloe East, vice president of UCW and an associate professor of economics at CU Boulder. “Collective bargaining affords faculty the right to demand that our employer allow us to maintain the standards of academic excellence we have worked hard to establish and the ability to do our jobs without fear.”
Ellis said collective bargaining could also help CU retain and recruit employees in a competitive academic labor market.
“A lot of professional research assistants have multiple degrees,” Ellis said of her colleagues at CU Anschutz. “They’re highly educated, and they love doing the exciting academic research, but they leave and go to private industry research because the pay isn’t good enough.” She said unions can also influence where graduate students choose to enroll.
“I know many students who have picked a university that has the right to bargain over another one that they got accepted to, because the stipend is just unlivable at some of these universities,” she said.
Until recently, Colorado was the only Democratic-led state in the country that denied collective bargaining rights to public higher-education workers. This distinction is now shared with Virginia, which recently elected a Democratic governor.
“Most of our peer institutions — such as the University of Michigan, Oregon, SUNY, Rutgers, the University of Connecticut and the University of California — already have collective bargaining rights for their workers,” East said. “These are the schools CU is benchmarked against.”
In the past, Colorado universities, including the CU system, have cited potential conflicts with longstanding shared governance organizations, such as the Boulder Faculty Assembly, as among the reasons they oppose collective bargaining.
Ellis pointed to endorsements from student governments at CU Boulder and UC Colorado Springs, as well as the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), as evidence that collective bargaining “will work well with the existing campus environment.” The Boulder Faculty Assembly has not announced a formal position on the proposal.
“In my experience, collective bargaining agreements can be good for everybody,” Hood said. “They can set clear and reasonable expectations for workers and employers alike, rules of the road for how certain issues are handled.”
He said he hopes the long lead-up to the June vote will allow for a thorough, open conversation.
“I want the discussion to be meaningful,” he said. “I want to hear from the university and other stakeholders about pushback on this. I want everybody to start talking and sharing what they believe are the pros and cons of this policy proposal, and I will listen intently to all of it.”
Timeline
Jan. 23: At the CU Board of Regents Governance Committee meeting, at-large Regent Elliot Hood announces his intention to introduce a proposal expanding collective bargaining.
Feb. 5: The CU Board of Regents holds a regular meeting. Collective bargaining is not on the agenda, but union members plan to advocate during public comment beginning at 1 p.m.
March 12: Hood is expected to formally introduce a collective bargaining policy at the Governance Committee meeting, placing it on the agenda for future discussions.
April 16: The full Board of Regents will be formally informed that the Governance Committee is reviewing a collective bargaining proposal. Any regent may raise the issue publicly at this meeting.
May 14: The Governance Committee is scheduled to hold a more detailed discussion of the proposal.
June 4: The full Board of Regents is expected to vote on whether to expand collective bargaining to faculty, staff and student employees.
Correction, February 5, 2026 11:48 am: A previous version of this story reported that Nicole Speer eliminated her own job at CU Boulder last year. While Speer advised her boss that cutting her role was the most practical option, Speer's position was terminated by the institute that employed her.
