UFCW Local 7, Colorado

Middle-class grocery workers are expressing their disappointment that Gov. Ritter sided with corporate interests over working families and an economic recovery by vetoing HB 1170. HB 1170 supported the safety net for Colorado workers by ensuring that  employees who want to go to work but who have been locked out from their job by their employer in order to force concessions are able to collect unemployment insurance benefits.
 
 “As someone who voted for Bill Ritter in 2006, and who believed him when he talked about ‘policies that intersect with where people struggle’ in his inaugural address, I’m really disappointed that he hasn’t kept his promises to working people.” said Andrea Karr, a 20-year Safeway employee who works in Englewood and lives in Highlands Ranch. “This was a veto from someone who doesn’t understand people like me, people like me work hard and play by the rules to support our families. The big corporations have the advantage in this fight. They have the money and the power, as the Governor’s veto today showed.”
 
“Nobody asked workers about timing when Gov. Owens changed the law in 1999,” said Julie Collier, a 30-year King Soopers employee from Westminster.  “When is the timing right to help the people who make $10 an hour, not just the people who make $10 million a year?”
 
For more than 30 years, Colorado union employees could rely on unemployment insurance if management locked them out of their job.  In 1996, workers at Safeway were locked out by the corporation in order to force concessions after a strike vote by King Soopers employees. The locked-out Safeway workers were able to collect unemployment compensation to tide them over until the issues were resolved more than a month later. The law was then changed in 1999 by Gov. Owens on a straight party-line vote in the legislature in order to prohibit locked-out workers from being eligible to collect unemployment insurance.
 
HB 1170 would have reversed that policy.  It would have taken effect on July 1, 2009, well past the current grocery contracts’ deadline on May 30.