January 19, 2011 11:33 PM UTC

A Little Pugilism Aside, Labor Introduces Moderate Agenda

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Business Journal’s Ed Sealover reports:

The five-point legislative agenda, nicknamed “Reinvest in Colorado,” includes a push to give public bidding preferences to companies whose workforce comes from within Colorado and who use products made in America. More broadly, it also seeks to protect the jobs and salaries of state workers in the budget-cutting process, to continue providing unemployment benefits and to stop the state from awarding contracts to companies that outsource jobs internationally.

Gone from the agenda are past controversial efforts to require union-scale pay on state public-works projects, to allow workers to collect unemployment insurance benefits during lockouts and to tilt the state’s Labor Peace Act in favor of unions.

Phil Hayes, political and legislative director for the [Colorado AFL-CIO], said officials have begun talks with business leaders in hopes of getting organizations to support some or all of the bills. But he said he feels the new agenda is in the spirit of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s call to work across traditional divides to look to turn around the economy.

The “Hire Colorado Act” to give preference to bids for state projects that use in-state labor is an interesting idea, that might prove popular with local business interests–who could sway some Republicans. Of course, there was some red meat to be found yesterday, for all the moderation on display–House Minority Leader Sal Pace’s speech to the labor-friendly crowd got a little more fiery than, as it turned out, he really wanted it to, leading to an apology for his employment of “overboard” rhetoric.

We’re having trouble drawing equivalency between Rep. Pace’s metaphor of putting “my fist where I need to put it” for good jobs and Sarah Palin’s infamous crosshairs “survey marks,” but we’ll concede that the choice of words might have been off-angle to the intended message. That doesn’t allow much in the way of faux outrage from Republicans, though, unless they really want to start making these kinds of comparisons (from J. Paul Brown to Scott Renfroe, they don’t).

Bombast aside, if Pace is forced to (pardon us) “step into the ring” over this much more moderate slate of bills than labor interests have put forward in prior years, he’ll have plenty of backup.