Your membership with Colorado WINS

From Denver to Durango, whether we work downtown or up in the mountains, state employees make the way for our communities to thrive. We clear the highways, maintain secure and safe prisons, care for veterans, people with mental illness and/or developmental disabilities and much much more. We came together in our union, Colorado WINS, to make sure that we have all the resources we need to keep serving our communities. After all, most of us are here to make the world around us a little better, and state services felt like the best way to do that. When we all come together through our union, we can get improvements, like high quality equipment and better staffing levels, to do our jobs to the best of our ability.

Recently Colorado state employees were targeted with an email from a group called Opt Out Today. They are part of a deceptive marketing campaign from the Freedom Foundation, a corporate front group funded by the Koch Brothers that does not have our best interest in mind.

This group targets unions like ours because we are a threat to their agenda to privatize and profit off services we all need, like quality care for our veterans and safe highways. They made their justification for these extreme positions clear in the Bend Bulletin when they wrote about “protecting taxpayers from public employees’ handsome salaries and lavish benefits.”

We do not accept drop forms from Opt Out Today. If you are interested in terminating your membership with Colorado WINS, please send an email to info@cowins.org to begin the process of leaving your state employees’ union.

Debunking their claims:

Opt Out Today Claim 1: If I leave the union, “will I still receive the same wages and benefits? Yes.”

FALSE: Study after study has shown that in states where more people are members in union, wages are higher because we bargain from a position of strength and push back on groups like Opt Out Today who call for cuts.

Opt Out Today Claim 2: “Does opting out affect my pension? No.”

FALSE: We have a pension because we have a strong union. Where unions are weak, like in Wisconsin, groups like Opt Out Today have successfully cut pensions.

Opt Out Today Claim 3: “Send this form end and get your money back now!”

We do not accept forms from Opt Out Today to terminate your Colorado WINS membership. If you would like to stop your Colorado WINS payroll deductions, please email info@cowins.org.

(Note: If you elected to stop being a dues payer, you will not be able to serve on committees, you will not receive member-only communications and will not be able to attend member-only meetings.)