Fight for right to picket

David W. Crowell

Thursday, Jan. 29, 1998 | 9:15 a.m.

First published on Sept. 23, 1991.

Culinary workers plan to go to court to. see if they have the right to pass out leaflets and talk to the customers at the doors of the Frontier HotelCasino, where the union has been striking for three days.

During a demonstration Sunday, more than two dozen members of the Culinary union, including President Hattie Canty and Secretary-Treasurer Jim Arnold, were arrested outside the Strip hotel.

Metro Police Lt. Jim Dillon said 27 strikers were arrested on trespassing charges while the union put the number of arrests at 28.

Union members began passing out leaflets to customers immediately outside the doors of the Frontier when the strike began Saturday morning.

"For some reason they've changed their minds," said Arnold of the hotel's decision to have the demonstrators arrested for trespassing. "That's been kind of the Frontier's modus operandi even in negotiations." The arrests started shortly after 3 p.m., and came one after another for about 30 minutes. As one union member was arrested, and led off by police to a paddy wagon, another Culinary member came up and took his place.

After the last arrest, Glen Arnodo, a Culinary business agent, said there would be further demonstrations 'before the issue is decided by a judge. The union had to stop the civil disobedience or there would have been no one left on the picket line.

"We'll space it out, but there will be more arrests I imagine, he said.

The union members arrested Sunday were taken to the Clark County Detention Center where they were booked, fingerprinted, photographed and released, said Dillon.

Arnodo said the hotel was unsuccessful in Clark County District Court Friday when it tried to obtain a temporary restraining order to prevent the union's strike efforts from leaving the sidewalks in front of the hotel and reaching its doors.

The union official compared the protest to the civil rights movement in the South during the 1960s.

"We're going to the courts to uphold our rights," he said. "We're going to sit at the front of the bus today."

The Culinary workers have been without a contract at the Frontier since 1989 when the old pact expired. The contract talks broke down in February 1990 when the hotel placed its last offer on the table and then implemented it without the union's consent.

The union contends that Frontier workers are paid as much as a full dollar an hour less than at other Strip resorts and that management has destroyed health and pension benefits.

The hotel has threatened in the past to replace strikers with non-union workers.

In 1990, the union conducted a 9.5-month strike at Binion's Horseshoe Hotel in downtown Las Vegas.