Anecdotal Only: Up to 75% of union wins in Colorado failed to result in contracts
Although the data is incomplete, it paints a picture of union failures at the bargaining table.
On Tuesday, the Colorado Sun published an interesting article which provided some anecdotal analysis of union failure rates in the State of Colorado.
In its analysis, the writers looked at the time period from Jan 1, 2020, to Feb. 29, 2024 and found that unions are not only losing the majority of National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections, of those elections that unions won, slightly more than 25 percent of union wins in Colorado ever got a first-time agreement.
A Colorado Sun analysis of the union formation in the state between Jan 1, 2020, and Feb. 29, 2024, found that 143 petitions from Colorado workers were filed with the National Labor Relations Board. So far, only 63, or 44%, were successful in unionizing. Of those, about one quarter, or 16, have confirmed they’ve reached their first contract. Another 14 unions did not respond to requests for an update. [Emphasis added.]
“There’s no central repository for union contracts,” the Colorado Sun’s writers state, acknowledging some of the flaws in their data sources. “The NLRB keeps track of workplaces that file for representation, but not all do, so even that data is incomplete.”
Despite the lack of contract information, a number of studies have tried to pinpoint the time frame between when a union is recognized and when a contract is ratified. A Bloomberg Law analysis of data from 2005 to 2022 put the average time to contract at 465 days, and that’s getting longer. From 2020 to 2022, getting a contract took more than 500 days.
The Economic Policy Institute looked at research from the past two decades and found that as the years went by, the rate of unresolved contracts after the first year grew from 44% in a 2008 study to 63% in a 2018 study.
Despite the anecdotal nature of the information, it is an interesting article.
Read the whole article here.