Colorado seems to be a buzz with labor union activity. JBS meatpackers in Greeley are primed to walk if a bargaining session Friday goes sour. Denver Art Museum employees rallied last week because two years after unionizing, they have no contract. Meanwhile, table staff and bartenders at the iconic Casa Bonita restaurant have a fresh new union.
Still, 2025 was rough for local labor organizers. It began with President Donald Trump ending collective bargaining rights for workers at many federal agencies over security concerns. In May, Gov. Jared Polis vetoed a union-supported bill to end a state policy requiring workers to vote a second time to start a union. And by the year’s end, petitions to unionize in Colorado fell to 34, down 40% from the prior year when the post-pandemic peak averaged more than one new filing a week.
All that stress appears to have taken a toll on union membership, according to new data out Wednesday from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the U.S., union membership was flat in 2025 from the prior year. In Colorado, it was down 22%, the biggest drop nationwide. The state was also in the bottom third for union density, or the percent of workers represented by a union compared to the overall workforce.
BLS economist Reid Kelley didn’t seem too concerned. The data comes from the Current Population Survey, he said, and it’s a small sample. Plus, October data wasn’t collected due to the federal government shutdown. Kelley recommended viewing Colorado data over several years, which showed that after an 18% gain in 2018, union members dropped 15.7% in 2019, then 23.2% in 2020. Between 2022 and 2024, membership increased in the state.
“The net result of this is that we would not make all that much of the Colorado 2024-2025 change,” Kelley said in an email. “You can see how Colorado’s union membership estimates have changed from year to year; the table shows, in percentage terms, how much the estimate of union members has changed year-to-year. Looking at this, the 2024-2025 over-the-year change is on the larger side but not out of the norm of its year-to-year fluctuations.”
Dennis Dougherty, executive director of the Colorado AFL-CIO, said he, too, tends to be wary of the BLS data, even in years when the state grew. He said he checked with several private sector unions around the state and found no one was reporting a big drop in membership. And to his knowledge, there weren’t any private sector unions shutting down, or decertifying.
“Based on everyone I talked to, there wasn’t a dip in teachers unions. We’ve actually made gains in public sector unions and municipalities and counties. There hasn’t been a dip in firefighters or police,” he said. “The largest dip probably came from the federal workforce.”
Before the October federal shutdown, Colorado employed about 54,300 federal workers, excluding the military, according to the state labor department. That number had dropped by 2,700 since January 2025, when the Trump administration introduced efforts to cut down on the size and cost of the federal government.
The annual BLS report is still an important data point, Dougherty said. It impacts the state’s “union density” rate, or the number of workers represented by unions compared with the overall workforce. Colorado’s rate dropped to 6.7% in 2025, from 7.7% a year earlier. The rate had peaked in 2018 at 12%. The U.S. rate is currently 11.2%.
“When you have a state with a 6.7% union density and you are wondering why there’s an affordability crisis in the state, this is a very important data point,” Dougherty said.
He pointed to a Colorado Fiscal Institute report that workers covered by a union average 10.2% more in wages. That higher wage also brings up wages for nonunion private-sector workers by $2,300, based on 2023 data.
“This is real money that workers don’t have in the state (compared) to other areas with a higher union density,” he said.
This story previously appeared in the Colorado Sun.
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