Hilton defeats a Laughlin union bid

Brian Seals

Tuesday, Aug. 4, 1998 | 11:28 a.m.

Nearly 1,000 workers at the Flamingo Hilton-Laughlin are no longer represented by the United Steelworkers of America.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., ruled Friday that the National Labor Relations Board erred in July 1997 when it ordered the hotel-casino to bargain with the union despite a 1993 election in which workers there rejected union representation by a 495 to 389 vote.

"The order is very significant for the employees of the Flamingo, because it frees them from a union they did not want," said Los Angeles attorney Joseph Herman, who represented the hotel-casino in court.

The court's decision sends the issue back to the NLRB. "I think it's extremely unlikely the board would issue another bargaining order," Herman said.

Steve Wamser, NLRB resident officer in Las Vegas, said the decision as to whether to accept the ruling or appeal it would be made in Washington.

"I think the real problem we had was the passage of time involved in a case like that," Wamser said. "That worked against us in this case."

After the 1993 election, the union charged Hilton had committed unfair labor acts prior to the vote and that those acts influenced the election. Over the course of a year the NLRB held a hearing on about 40 of those charges. The board then took the unusual step of ordering the hotel-casino to bargain with the union.

The board cited several actions by the hotel-casino that it held influenced the election:

--Providing various benefits, including improved health care coverage; implementing a more responsive grievance procedure; providing a seniority-based scheduling and assignment policy for cocktail servers.

--"Weeding" out prospective applicants with union connections; promoting the Culinary Union over the Steelworkers; questioning workers about their views on unionization.

--Telling employees benefits would worsen if the union won the election and suggesting that pro-union workers would be "blacklisted" among other casinos in the area.

However, the three-judge panel on the Court of Appeals ruled the NLRB failed to justify ordering the hotel-casino to bargain. The court held that factors such as passage of time and turnover among both management and workers would have made holding another election possible, rather than ordering bargaining.

"In this case neither the ALJ (administrative law judge) nor the Board made a sustainable finding that the circumstances warranted the 'extreme remedy' ordered," the judges ruled.

The court's ruling reinforces what workers at the hotel-casino voted for in 1993, said Flamingo Hilton Laughlin President Bill Biggelow.

"We are pleased with the appeals court's decision," Biggelow said. "It upholds our position that we've maintained all along."

The union represented workers in housekeeping, food and beverage, slots, coin room, bellmen, valets and front desk workers.

Positions at Las Vegas hotel-casinos such as housekeeping and food and beverage jobs are typically the domain of the Culinary Union. Laughlin is out of the jurisdiction of Culinary Local 226 in Las Vegas, said the union's secretary-treasurer, Jim Arnold.