Eleven workers in the Boulder Public Library District are organizing an effort to unionize.
A letter announcing the union campaign was posted on Wednesday on the website of the Colorado chapter of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, one of the largest unions in the country.
The workers will give a presentation on unionizing to the BPLD Board of Trustees in a meeting at 6 p.m. on Oct. 21 in the Canyon Meeting Room at the main branch, 1001 Arapahoe Ave. The BPLD then has the option to recognize the union. If it opts not to, then organizers will go to fellow employees to vote on the union.
Union organizers Karen Bowen, adult literacy program coordinator for the literacy program BoulderReads, and Michael Serrano, lead custodian at the BPLD, told the Daily Camera on Thursday that the effort doesn’t come from a place of unhappiness. Rather, they said workers are excited for the future of the BPLD and that unionization will only help provide services to the public.
“A strong library has strong workers,” Serrano said. “That’s all we really want. If we have collective bargaining rights, if we have job security, we can give the best service to the community.”
Jennifer Phares, director of business and administration for the BPLD, said in a Thursday email to the Daily Camera that the BPLD leadership team “learned of the staff’s intention to form a union earlier this week.”
“I’m looking forward to their presentation and learning more about it,” Phares wrote.
Library workers were previously members of the Boulder Municipal Employees Association, or BMEA, the union of city workers, when the library was officially part of the city. But a side-effect of the ballot measure that voters approved in 2022, which established a tax that funds the library district as opposed to it being a city department, was that workers lost union protections.
Specifically, employees lost a contract that was negotiated through the BMEA and they became at-will employees. The first full year of the BPLD was 2024.
“It has a chilling effect on my day-to-day work at the library. I felt like if I were to speak up against certain managerial decisions, I could be fired at any time,” Serrano said. “We saw some people let go early on and it had a chilling effect on my ability to point out things.”
Conversations on unionization began a year and a half or two years ago, Bowen said. She added that there appears to be support for unionization among BPLD employees. Organizers decided “months ago” to connect with the AFSCME, Bowen said.
The organizers are specifically looking to restore collective bargaining rights.
Organizers envision the union accomplishing “maintenance of exceptional public services,” increased worker retention and satisfaction, worker input in “all important decisions and policies going forward,” improved communication between workers and administration to “reach resolution more quickly and effectively,” and a “legacy of inclusion and democracy at Boulder Public Libraries going forward,” according to the letter.
Joining Bowen and Serrano as co-signers to the Wednesday letter were Christine Burke, Cosmo Wright, Ignacio Jimenez-Torres, Jess Villanueva, Robin Pope, Lara Hnizdo, Krissy Jensen, Melanie Borski-Howard and Rachel Garfield-Levine.
The BPLD encompasses five locations, including the recently opened NoBo Library, 4500 13th St., in North Boulder. A branch in Gunbarrel may open as soon as sometime this month, director David Farnan said in July.
The AFSCME has more than 1.4 million members nationwide, according to the union. The Colorado chapter had 1,226 members at the end of 2024, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor.
“You’re greeted at the desk, your child goes in to use the services (or go to) story hour, maybe you go to makerspace for woodworking, or you go to the cafe … all of those are delivered by people who will do a better job if they feel supported,” Bowen said.