This is the fourth episode of a five-part series for The Colorado Dream: Happy Birthday! The stories in this series are part of the KUNC podcast The Colorado Dream, airing on Mondays beginning June 29. The podcast is available for download wherever you listen to podcasts and on kunc.org.
Colorado’s workers helped build the state, laboring in its mines, fields and factories. Many did so in dangerous conditions, for low pay and with few protections.
Their stories span more than a century, from the company-controlled coal camps of southern Colorado to the sugar beet fields in Fort Collins and labor debates still unfolding at the state Capitol. The industries and workplaces have changed, but the central question remains: How much power do workers have over their jobs and their lives?
A company-controlled life
In the early 1900s, coal was big business in Colorado. Hundreds of mines operated across the state, employing about one in every 10 Colorado workers. One of the largest coal companies at the time was the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, owned by tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Many of its mines were in remote parts of southern Colorado, far from established cities and transportation networks.
“There was no transportation, there was no trucks, so they had to build the town right at the mine,” said Bob Butero, a regional director with the United Mine Workers of America. “That became known as a coal camp.”
Colorado Fuel and Iron operated nearly two dozen coal camps in the southern part of the state. The miners lived with their families in company-owned houses, received medical care from doctors employed by the company and were sometimes paid in money that could only be spent in the camp.
The arrangement gave the company control over nearly every part of its workers’ lives.
“It was almost like an imprisonment,” Butero said. “They were watched. They had company guards.”
The work inside the mines was hazardous, the pay was low and protections were limited. Safety violations were frequent, and miners had little control over the conditions in which they worked.
By 1913, workers across the region had grown increasingly frustrated. They turned to their union, the United Mine Workers of America, which presented Colorado Fuel and Iron with a list of demands.
The miners wanted an eight-hour workday. They also wanted the freedom to choose their own housing and doctors rather than relying on services controlled by the company.
Colorado Fuel and Iron rejected their demands. So, the workers took action.
In September 1913, thousands of miners gathered in Trinidad. They marched through the city singing “The Battle Cry of Union,” an old labor song adapted from a Civil War anthem, stopped at the union hall, and cast their votes to strike.
The decision carried immediate consequences. Colorado Fuel and Iron pushed the striking workers and their families out of the company-owned coal camps. The workers moved into tent colonies established by the union, including one near the town of Ludlow.
The strike continued through the winter and into the following spring. Seven months after the workers cast their votes, violence erupted.
The Ludlow Massacre
On April 20, 1914, gunfire broke out between the striking miners and local militia employed by Colorado Fuel and Iron. Tents burned as families ran for cover, with some seeking shelter in underground cellars dug beneath the colony
Four women and 11 children crowded into one of those spaces. The cellar was built from dirt and wood planks and had barely enough room for them to stand.
“You can imagine, you know, four women, 11 children in this hole in the ground,” Butero said. “Overhead, they’re hearing the bullets.”
As the fighting continued, the group became trapped. Smoke from the burning tents poured into the cellar, and the oxygen began to run out.
The fighting lasted about 14 hours. By the time it ended, 21 people had been killed, including all 11 children and two of the women inside the cellar.
Ludlow, and the former tent colony, is now a ghost town and a National Historic Landmark, about 70 miles south of Pueblo. On the windswept plains at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a gray stone memorial marks the site of the massacre. A woman holding a baby is carved into the monument, with a man standing beside her.
“It’s about those people that inhabited this tent colony, and the struggles that they went through,” said Butero, who serves as caretaker of the memorial and is a former coal miner.
A heavy metal door beside the monument leads down into the cellar where the women and children hid. The space is now preserved in concrete, a physical reminder of the families caught in the violence.
The memorial marks the human cost of a strike the miners ultimately did not win. But what happened at Ludlow forced Colorado and the country to confront what workers were risking when they demanded basic protections.
“There was never no such thing as weekends,” Butero said. “There was never anything such as (an) eight-hour workday… child labor laws...”
News of the massacre spread far beyond Colorado. Ludlow became a flashpoint in the national debate over company power, worker safety and the conditions miners and their families faced. Public outrage pushed Congress to investigate conditions in Colorado’s coal mines, and major national labor laws followed in the years that came after.
“Even though this strike was lost, there was a lot of gains made for these people,” Butero said.
Those gains did not happen all at once, but some came quickly. In 1915, one year after the massacre, Colorado lawmakers created a workers’ compensation system that gave injured employees a path to medical care and wage benefits.
Butero said the protections that allowed him to work more safely were built on the sacrifices of the miners who came before him.
“I was able to work underground because of the health and safety that they went through,” he said. “Little by little, they made the improvements.”
Those protections, however, did not reach every worker equally.
Not everyone was protected
Women, domestic workers and agricultural workers often had to wage separate battles for safety, fair pay and the right to organize.
About a decade after the Ludlow Massacre, another chapter in Colorado’s labor history was unfolding farther north, in the sugar beet fields of Larimer County. During the 1920s and ’30s, sugar beets were the region’s cash crop, so valuable that they became known as “white gold.”
The industry brought factories, money and growth to communities such as Fort Collins, but that prosperity depended on grueling labor, much of it performed by Hispanic workers and immigrants from Mexico.
Their contributions were often overlooked and, over time, nearly forgotten.
The Museo de las Tres Colonias, or the Museum of the Three Colonies, sits in a quiet Fort Collins neighborhood near Sugar Beet Park. The small adobe house with light teal trim, built in 1935, preserves the history of the people who worked in the sugar beet fields.
Many of those workers lived in the Tres Colonias neighborhoods of Buckingham, Andersonville and Alta Vista. The communities were segregated from much of Fort Collins, and the families who lived there were often treated as outsiders even as their labor helped the city prosper.
Longtime community advocate Betty Aragon helped establish the museum in 2001.
“We’re not part of the community, but you want our labor force,” Aragon said. “So many people knew it as the people that lived across the tracks.”
Many of the stories preserved at the museum began in the fields, where entire families, including children, pulled and cut sugar beets. Workers spent long days bent over rows of crops, often in extreme heat.
“You work sun up to sun down in extreme heat, bent over most of the day, because you’re going up one row, down another,” Aragon said.
The grueling conditions were compounded by low pay and discrimination against the Hispanic and Mexican families who supplied much of the labor. For people struggling to support their families, there were often few other options.
“When you are trying to feed your family, you’re going to do whatever work you can get,” Aragon said. “People took advantage.”
Their work helped build northern Colorado and contributed to Fort Collins’ growth. But Aragon said many sugar beet workers were made to feel ashamed of that labor, while the larger community showed little interest in the people behind the profitable crop.
She has worked to change that through the Museo de las Tres Colonias.
“We made a lot of money. Fort Collins flourished,” Aragon said. “At what price, and on whose backs?”
That same dismissive attitude showed up in national labor law, too. In the 1930s, the New Deal gave many workers a legal right to organize and bargain collectively. But agricultural and domestic workers — like the sugar beet farmers — were often excluded from federal protections.
“The lasting impact is they get better wages than $11 a day,” Aragon said. “There’s still a lot of discrimination — discrimination against our immigrant community. You know, we’re still fighting the fight that we fought decades ago.”
The fight over farmworker protections continues
Over the roughly nine decades since the New Deal, some protections have expanded, but significant gaps remain for agricultural workers in Colorado.
In 2021, state lawmakers passed an ag workers’ rights law intended to address some of those gaps. It expanded protections involving pay and workplace conditions, but the jobs remain dangerous.
In August 2025, six workers were killed and three others were injured at a dairy farm in Weld County. The incident drew statewide and national attention to agricultural worker safety. Federal investigators later traced the deaths to toxic gas leaking from the dairy’s manure system, and three companies were fined for serious workplace safety failures.
During Colorado’s 2026 legislative session, lawmakers didn’t introduce any new legislation intended to protect workers like those killed at the dairy. Instead, they passed an agricultural labor bill that rolled back overtime protections for farmworkers.
Agricultural workers now receive overtime pay after working 56 hours in a week. State Rep. Elizabeth Velasco, a Democrat from Glenwood Springs, opposed the change.
“A 40-hour work week was established to signal to employers that working any more than that comes at the detriment to the workers' health and safety,” Velasco said during debate on the bill in the House chamber. “If a worker is to work over 40 hours a week, then they must be compensated fairly for the risk.”
Agricultural workers in Colorado are primarily Hispanic and Latino immigrants. Velasco argued that they should have the same protections as workers in other industries and that those protections extend beyond overtime pay.
“We are creating unfair conditions for workers, because people cannot make ends meet, because more people need support,” she said.
The power to organize
The same year, Colorado lawmakers considered another major labor proposal around the power workers have to organize and negotiate with their employers.
Colorado has an 80-year-old law called the Labor Peace Act. It requires workers to complete a two-step election process before a union can require everyone it represents to help pay for collective bargaining. The first vote allows employees to form a union. In the second, 75% of workers must approve allowing the union to negotiate an agreement requiring represented employees to pay fees, even if they are not union members.
Colorado is the only state with this law.
“The second election is the entire problem,” said Democratic state Rep. Javier Mabrey of Denver. “The second election is what gives the bosses more time to union-bust and more time to fire people, to retaliate against people for organizing.”
Mabrey sponsored a bill — named the Worker Protection Act by supporters — that would have eliminated the second vote. Lawmakers passed it, but Gov. Jared Polis vetoed it for the second year in a row. Polis said the proposal still was not a compromise that worked for both workers and employers.
“It is sad that we’re still having to have conversations like this so long after the Ludlow Massacre,” Mabrey said.
A debt to Colorado’s workers
The Ludlow Massacre happened in 1914, but its significance is not confined to history. It became part of the foundation for labor rights in Colorado and across the country, and helped push worker protections forward.
For Butero, that is why the people who lived and died at Ludlow still matter.
“Every worker, you know, whatever you do, you owe these people a debt of gratitude,” he said.
More than a century later, the questions raised after the Ludlow Massacre remain: who gets protected, who doesn’t, and how much power do employees have on the job?
The struggle for workers’ rights continues as Colorado turns 150 years old.
Next episode
Some of the greatest songs in the world were made in Colorado. The final episode of The Colorado Dream: Happy Birthday, explores the musicians and sounds that emerged from the state and how that Colorado-born music continues to resonate today. Subscribe now where you get podcasts.
Credits
The Colorado Dream, Season 6: “Happy Birthday,” is a production of KUNC News. It is hosted, produced and edited by Stephanie Daniel. This episode was written and reported by Kyle McKinnon and Lucas Brady Woods. Additional editing was provided by Sean Corcoran. The theme song was composed by Jason Paton. Michelle Redo sound designed and mixed the episode. Alex Murphy is the digital editor.
“The Battle Cry of Union” song was provided by Colorado singer John McCutcheon.
Special thanks to Rachel Cohen, Leigh Paterson, Kim Rais, Emma VandenEinde and History Colorado. Tammy Terwelp is KUNC’s president and CEO.
