There's few unions in the Roaring Fork Valley-- and now, there's another.Full-time bus drivers with the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority have voted to unionize. Ballots were counted in Denver on Wednesday by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. The final count didn’t begin until the mail arrived late at Colorado’s labor agency after 3pm. Heavy snow had delayed the delivery. Driver Ed Cortez was waiting breathlessly, with a representative of the Amalgamated Transit Union.
“We’re a union now. It feels very very good to me, we worked very hard. And the results of that were reflected in today’s vote,” says Cortez, sounding relieved. “As of today labor has changed in the Roaring Fork Valley.”
65 RFTA drivers decided in favor of unionization, with 22 against. Cortez says that’s about what he and other pro union organizers expected. Dan Blankenship is RFTA’s CEO has this reaction to drivers adopting the union.
“It indicates that there’s a strong desire on the part of the drivers to begin working with the union and collectively bargaining for their wages and benefits and certain work rules.”
Blankenship said he had a feeling the union proposal would go through, pointing to a similar effort in the early 2000’s. “We’ve had a union before, and these things go in cycles, and I think that we’ve come through a period of recession, where wage increases were frozen for a couple of years, and they’ve been relatively modest since then.”
A key issue for Ed Cortez and other pro union drivers has been pay. They believe for most it doesn’t cover the high cost of living in the Roaring Fork Valley. Blankenship points to the top pay being higher than other similar transit agencies in the mountain region.
Of the more than a 100 full-time bus drivers, 32 at RFTA are making at or near top pay. That’s $22.00 - $25.86 an hour. Differences aside, the public debate between the drivers and RFTA has been diplomatic. “I want to compliment the proponents of the union, the people that were leading the effort,” Dan Blankenship says. “I think overall they did a good job and I believe the process was not really disruptive to ongoing RFTA operations, everybody’s been performing in a professional manner.”
Organizer Ed Cortez explains the next step for drivers is to hold another election-- this time for picking local union leadership. There will be three with titles like President, Executive Vice-President, and Secretary Vice-Treasurer. Cortez says that could happen in about thirty days, “and then after that we’ll have a plan in place to begin the long journey towards collective bargaining.”
There would have to be another vote, if the union wanted to collect dues from drivers.
Colorado’s labor office mailed out 118 ballots for the election, so that means 31 weren’t turned in, in time. There was an extended deadline because some ballots had been mailed to the wrong home addresses. Labor officials, RFTA, and union organizers all have said they’re content with how those problems were handled.
