Business group promotes Colo. anti-discrimination laws to workers with ads

Citing concerns about Colorado’s exceptionally low unemployment, an independent business group made a “fivefigure” ad buy in publications in Florida last month specifically directed at LGBTQ workers and entrepreneurs there.

The message: Come to Colorado. We have anti-discrimination protections, unlike the Sunshine State.

Good Business Colorado placed its rainbow-bearing advertisement with 16 publications in total. Most versions ran last month, according to a spokeswoman. They included online and print ads with papers including The Miami Herald, the Tampa Bay Times and the Orlando Sentinel, and a handful of local business journals. A three-week arrangement with Florida Politics means subscribers to that organization’s newsletter are still seeing the ad this week.

“We are looking to attract both businesses as well as workers; people who are incredible people but are not getting the support they need at work to be who they are in the workplace,” said Debra Brown, Good Business Colorado’s executive director.

Digital versions of the ad link to the webpage goodbusinesscolorado.org/ startyourbusinesshere. Touting Colorado’s best-in-the-nation economy (according to a recent U.S. News and World Report list), the page provides information about how to start a business in Colorado or move one into the state and offers links to job boards.

At the top is a survey. The final question is: “Which state has more workplace protections for LGBTQ people?” Colorado lands in the Human Rights Campaign’s top tier for LGBTQ-friendly policies, the site says, providing a link to that organization’s 2018 rankings. Florida, along with 27 other states, falls into the lowest tier, labeled “high priority to achieve basic equality.”

Advocacy organization Equality Florida notes on its website that “there is still no statewide law that prohibits discrimination against LGBTQ people in Florida,” meaning people can be fired for being gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or queer.

Good Business Colorado has more than 210 members. It is nonpartisan and focused on “triple-bottom-line business practices” that lead to profits, benefit people and protect the planet, Brown said.

“Our members have been dealing with a tight labor market just like everybody else, and we are looking at all angles of

how we can ensure there is a supply of skilled workers in Colorado,” she said of the motivation behind the campaign.

When asked why Florida and not any of the other 27 states that get low grades for LGBTQ protections, Brown replied: “We know Florida is competing to be the next Silicon Valley. We want that title for ourselves.”

In 1992, Colorado passed Amendment 2, a voter-approved change to the state constitution that barred local governments from passing anti-discrimination laws that protected LGBTQ people. It was eventually struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. More than a quarter century later, in 2018, Gov. Jared Polis made U.S. history when he became the first openly gay man elected governor in any state. He addressed the Good Business Colorado ad in a statement Wednesday.

“We are focused on expanding opportunity and building a Colorado for all where everyone in our state can live, work and thrive,” he said.

The ads did not catch the attention of economic development professionals in Florida. Representatives with the Florida Economic Development Council and the Miami-Dade Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce both said they had not seen the ads when reached by email this week and declined to comment further.

Adjustments might be made in the coming weeks, but Colorado’s average unemployment rate for 2019 was 2.8%, the lowest it’s been since 2000, said Patty Silverstein, a Littletonbased economist with three decades of experience in Colorado. The state’s labor participation rate is the fourth highest in the nation, meaning few people opting out of working.

“There’s just not a whole lot more people that we can pull into filling our positions here unless we are pulling them in from other are states or other parts of the globe for that matter,” Silverstein said.