(Un)ethical Leadership: How a “business-friendly” State Puts Workers Last—and At Risk

Smirking corporate lobbyist carrying wads of cash from a legislative building

During the pandemic shut-down, I worked remotely for an employer that required the use of my personal computer, phone, and internet for a year and never offered fair compensation for the use of my property. The employer repeatedly violated labor law concerning meals and breaks and wage theft. The employer demanded logging in and setting up work apps at least 15 minutes prior to scheduled start time and return after lunch but did not allow logging out 15 minutes prior to the end of the day. That is wage theft. Work related matters like professional development or soft skills training were required to be done on your lunch break; they were described as “brown bag” lunches. That violates lunch and breaks free from work. Their shared narrative about workers was that people are poor because they are lazy and will do anything to cheat the system. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Blame the people you seek to exploit for trying to cheat you. There is a second narrative that shapes their treatment of workers that I will describe later in this blog.

Even working remotely, a paternalistic environment of distrust and discrimination permeated operations. The top-level managers were male, the majority of task supervisors were male, and the majority of workers were female. All tasks were processed by separate, very small “teams” of employees who were not allowed to communicate with each other. Any such communication was admonished and the workers scolded. If you took what a supervisor thought was too much time to review a messy task you would see a pop-up message asking, “what are you doing?” or “do you need help?” Supervisors, of course, had the freedom to play with their kids, wash laundry, and order DoorDash while overlording a “team” to ensure workers enjoyed no such freedom of movement. Instead of focusing on serving people and getting the process right, supervisors tracked task completion and monitored keyboard activity. Typically, correcting one task created multiple additional tasks because the entire process was broken into multiple individual but interdependent tasks yet no access to the overall situation and feedback about how to improve the process was slapped away as offensive. The more task data the better to justify needing more funding which effectively disincentivizes doing the right thing the first time which would mean processing would be holistic rather than segregated.

To top it off, when the employer and a third-party contractor transferred 10 years of data from an archaic system to a new one, they left the connection open resulting in multiple private parties who had logged on to the website for their own use to download that data into Excel spreadsheets. Eventually, that data was discovered for sale on the Dark Web. It would be reasonable to expect the employer to take responsibility for their negligence and publicly report it so the thousands of people impacted by the theft of their name, address, DOB, SSN, work history, education, and bank account information could immediately lock their credit preventing fraudulent transactions in their name. Yet, that is not what happened. Why did they not disclose this security breach? Who the hell is this employer? 

The employer was the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, Unemployment Insurance Division. And rather than serving as a watchdog protecting workers, it serves as a lapdog for businesses. Businesses pay into the unemployment insurance fund, workers do not. Once the money is in the fund CDLE UI treats that money as the State’s asset and believes their mission is to protect the State’s asset by every available means. It generates burdens in the application process supposedly to filter out those who do not truly need the assistance; consider misleading legalese on forms, confusing instructions, automatic denial of benefits, administrative processes limited to their 9 to 5 schedule instead of your availability. These are mechanisms used across our tax-payer funded safety net programs as well. That approach alone calls for an overhaul. But at least one reason we don’t address how we gauge need versus greed is exposed in the labor department’s automatic bias in favor of the businesses. Money and power buys elections and lawmaking.

The monetary relationship between business and the labor department is why the state confidently advertises itself as being “business-friendly.” It is why an employee can quit a job without giving a notice, per at-will employment, but be judged ineligible for unemployment insurance. It is why an employer can treat employees as sub-human, firing them for using sick leave or for needing time off to respond to a family emergency or for daring to walk away from an employer for treating them as less than human. It is why CDLE sets up clawbacks after emergency federal funding ends. These behaviors are rooted in old norms of the Industrial Age that judged workers as lazy and we didn’t have 1099 workers to the extent that we do now. CDLEs paternalism feels like living in the 1950s. Despite its age, it lacks a clear situational awareness of the labor environment. For example, CDLE was gob-smacked to learn there were hundreds of thousands of Coloradans working in non-wage jobs, and many of them working both W2 and 1099 jobs. This should call their jobs data into question at the very least, but that’s for a future post. 

Returning to clawbacks, this was the most disturbing thing about CDLE, in my view. After September 4, 2021, CDLE sent notices to recipients to verify the dates and reasons for each weekly request for benefits they had made before a short deadline expired or they would be required to pay back the benefits. This occurred a year or more after the benefits were requested and went back to the beginning of the pandemic. People had gone back to work, and the media had warned of fraudsters using fake CDLE websites to contact benefit recipients. Nonetheless, no response generated a debt of tens of thousands of dollars per recipient who did not respond, required scheduling a bureaucratic hearing, and if absent from the hearing, sent to collection and or garnished from their wages and tax refunds. CDLE clawed back assistance to workers after the Great Recession that followed the housing bubble fiasco. Have they always done this to workers? This was the moment I began to understand why so many American workers, including Coloradans, are furious with government. A government that does not work for them or protect them from exploitation but serves the hand that feeds it. This explained how so many have been duped by a 1%er to elect him, to attempt an insurrection, to believe that immigrants are the cause of their hardship, and to re-elect him when the other party, the one that previously labeled them “a basket of deplorables,” hedged on issues important to all workers.

Since 2021, Colorado lawmakers created a program to pay unemployment insurance benefits to undocumented W-2 workers and is one of fourteen states that offer health coverage regardless of immigration status, including undocumented. Policies like these are likely fueling current anti-immigration tactics but without showing clear evidence for their actions. While there are a lot of problems with our social safety net programs, not the least of which is accountability in government administration, the reason for their existence is related to labor law. To summarize, CDLEs attitude toward workers exposes who they are and who they serve. CDLE judges. It doesn’t ask questions. It is a machine built to protect businesses. Furthermore, the unemployment insurance fund establishes a symbiotic relationship between business and the state, exclusive of workers. We need to ask questions: Where does the state use the money? Is it retained for future benefits? Is every penny of the fund retained, or just a percentage? CDLEs UI Fund ran dry just 3 months into the pandemic. How is jobs data and unemployment data collected and how is it analyzed?   

At the conclusion of Colorado’s legislative session this year, the governor vetoed a record number of 11 bills meant to set rules protecting Uber and Lift gig-workers, protect workers from wage theft, protect renters from rent-hiking app algorithms, and uncomplicate the process of forming a workers’ union. This record seems to confirm the pursuit of labor laws that favor business and government oversight mechanisms that restrict access to assistance. Ethical leadership matters. Government accountability and transparency is a fair expectation if we will have a government of, by, and for the people. Coloradans deserve better. All working people deserve better. How does your labor department treat workers in your state? It matters. We need answers and accountability.

If you have ever been stalked, you know: Some people are bat-shit crazy and you're on your own to cope with it

Image of a camera with a frowny face in the lens

September 2020, I moved into a new apartment in a nice, quiet neighborhood. I said hello to the female next door and she ignored me, looked the other way. Odd. Some weeks later I saw her again and said hello. This time she glared at me. She seemed hateful for whatever reason so I stopped making the effort to be civil. Anytime I saw her after that I looked past her like she was invisible and looked away when it was impossible to avoid walking past her.

Around spring or summer 2024 I received a piece of mail for her address, misdelivered by the mail carrier. Since I had not sifted through my mail at the box, I noticed I had her vehicle registration renewal notice mixed in with my mail as I walked up the stairs to my apartment. Well shit. I thought I would do the responsible thing despite her horrific attitude and give her mail to her. I knocked on her door. She opened the door and stared blankly at me without a word. I held out the notice and said it had been misdelivered to my mailbox. She snatched it out of my hand before the word ‘mailbox’ left my mouth and slammed the door in my face. I said ‘you’re welcome’ to the door.

February 2025, I noticed a ring camera had been installed on the door of the angry female’s apartment, aimed at my deck. On the rare occasion I went out to clear a path in the snow from my door to the stairs I heard the microphone on her camera engage and some odd noise uttered into the mic. I said out loud, partly to myself, “if you’re testing your mic it works.” It seemed that confirmation ended her curiosity. Until it didn’t.

Throughout the summer 2025, I would go outside to put my umbrella up to block the sun from heating my apartment to 85 degrees by 0700. The angry female repeatedly keyed her mic and made noises at me. I told her camera to get its eyes off me. At other times I said shut the fuck up. And at others I resorted to sign language. You can guess which finger. Why the interest in escalating the harassing and stalking aided by her camera aimed at my deck after her unilateral mic-check during the winter? Her drug addiction, maybe?

During this record-setting hot summer, the stench of pot smoke and cigarette smoke coming from the angry female’s apartment had become a regular nuisance and directly harming my health. The smoke was so heavy it permeated the entire south end of the building, lingered in the stairwell and on my deck, and entered my apartment through my window air conditioner and front door. I had raised the issue of smoke getting into my apartment many times with the manager, but he would not address it. Therefore, as of June 27^th, I started dropping complaints to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment citing the violation of the Clean Indoor Air Act. Although the law designated CDPHE responsible for implementation, they declined stating they did not have enforcement authority and told me to contact El Paso County Public Health. At the same time, I filed a complaint on the GoCOS app used by the City to manage public communication which ended up being assigned to CSPD; CSPD also told me to contact EPC Public Health. City Code designates enforcement of smoking regulations to EPC Public Health. I continued filing complaints with CDPHE, per state law, and began reporting the problem to EPC Health as well, per City Code. EPC also claimed they did not have enforcement authority. I filed 12 complaints between the end of June and the end of July with both CDPHE and EPC Public Health. Additionally, I used about 2 bottles of ZEP smoke odor eliminator to clean my air conditioner, twice, and deodorize the air outside my door during her day-long pot smoking sessions that contaminated my property and the air in the stairwell, my deck, and the storage space at the end of my deck.

On July 26^th I filed a maintenance request on AppFolio that manages the property citing the pot smoke coming from her apartment into my apartment. On the 29^th the manager finally took action, sort of. A notice was emailed to all residents clarifying the smoking restrictions overall and for each building. Building 901 was directed to stay 25 feet from any shared entryway and no smoking was allowed in the atrium. Building 855, where I live next to the pot smoker, was directed to not smoke near an open window where your smoke might go into another person’s unit and if smoking on the balcony ensure your smoke is not going toward another unit.

Well, you can guess correctly that the angry female lost her mind and began to harass me as I described above to include her throwing absolute toddler-style tantrums in the form of door slamming and pounding her fists the entire length of the shared wall from my living room to my bedroom. It is now October and she continues with the tirades. That is some bullshit. But I have my own camera now and I have a record of every door slam and fit she throws. I don’t go outside my door without an umbrella or a big hat or shopping bag to block my face. For some reason that really annoys her, too. Whatever.

It seems a waste of time, money, and resources to create state laws that no one will enforce, and local control effectively renders useless. I have encountered the same emphasis on process and lack of accountability in my job administering social safety net programs. Including immigrant status verification. The Social Security Administration can verify status which determines eligibility for assistance programs, each with its own, very different eligibility requirements. However, when they find a fraudulent document, SSN, or ID number it’s not like they’re going to go knock on that door or notify law enforcement. Lack of transparency, providing clear evidence, and failure in leadership have put us where we are. We need to start asking more questions, listen with intention, and ask more questions to understand what is going on. Especially when engaging elected officials and bureaucrats. Don’t believe everything you hear because you think this or that politician has your back. The only safe assumption in this chaos is to assume they don’t. Think critically. Ask questions. Search for the facts instead of repeating the easy political narratives. In the end, without accountability in government we are all living in hell.