Democrats on the House Business Affairs and Labor committee on Thursday rejected a so-called “right-to-work” bill seeking to ban employers from mandating workers join unions or pay union dues.

The 8-5 party line vote to indefinitely postpone the bill from two House Republicans came after representatives from a number of unions urged the committee to reject the legislation. Among those testifying against the bill was Anthony Scorzo, the vice president of the Denver chapter of Communications Workers of America. He said the proposal “serves no purpose other than to erode the gains that unions have made on the job over the last century.”

Mark Thompson, a Colorado Springs carpenter and member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, dubbed the effort “right-to-work for less.”

“This is union-busting legislation – it always has been, always will be,” Thompson said. “This is strictly to weaken unions.”

But Rep. Tonya Van Beber, R-Eaton, countered that the bill was in no way “anti-union” and said framing it as such was “completely missing the point.”

“What it does is protect freedom of speech in the form of how one expends their finances,” said Van Beber, who ran the bill alongside Rep. Kim Ransom, R-Lone Tree.

Ransom, meanwhile, referenced Scorzo’s comments earlier in the hearing.

“I’d rather have gains of employees rather than gains of unions,” she said. “Now they might be the same, but as a company gets stronger, the employees will generally get paid more as well.”

The appeals from the two Republicans didn’t win over any of the panel’s Democrats, who voted in a block to kill the bill. Committee Chair Dylan Roberts, D-Avon, said while the witness testifying in support of the bill cited statistics and studies, they failed to present evidence backing up their case.

“What we didn’t hear today was any examples of people saying that they had bad impacts from a union,” Roberts said. “What we did hear a lot of evidence of was the benefit of a union for workers across the state from all different types of professions.”

“We certainly need to take more steps, whether government or non-governmental, to improve our economy but I don’t think that this is one of those things.”