Frontier told: Sell or settle

Dave W. CroweII

Thursday, Jan. 29, 1998 | 9:14 a.m.

The owners of the Frontier Hotel-Casino should settle their contract dispute with the Culinary Workers or sell out, a national labor leader said Monday.

"That's what you are going to have to say to the Frontier," Thomas Donahue, secretary

treasurer of the AFL-CIO, told the more than 100 members of the union's strike committee.

The contract between the hotel and Local 226 expired in 1989 and talks between the union and management have broken off without a new agreement. The committee is

expected to decide later this week whether it will ask the 680 employees at the Strip resort for a strike vote.

The Frontier, owned by the family of Margaret Elardi, is one of the few remaining Las Vegas resorts that has not negotiated a new contract with the Culinary Workers.

Donahue, in Las Vegas for the general convention of the Laborers' International Union of North America, compared the problems at the Frontier with the 1990 strike by workers at The New York Daily News. The owners eventually sold the paper to settle the labor dispute, he said.

"If the Frontier pushes around the workers in this hotel, then some other employer will say 'maybe I can do it too,' " Donahue said. He pledged organized labor's support if the Frontier workers walk out.

The labor leader said a strike at the Frontier would hurt the business of other hotels in Las Vegas. "It's going to hurt this city," he said. "That's what the danger is to all the other hotels. "

Donahue suggested other hotel owners in Las Vegas may need to find a way to bring pressure on the Elardi family to settle the contract.

During the Culinary Workers' 9.5-month strike at the Horseshoe Hotel-Casino on Fremont Street, gaming revenues were down for the downtown resorts last year.

The two sides in the Frontier dispute have not met since Aug. 7 and no progress was made at that meeting. It was the first and only meeting since talks broke down in 1989 when the hotel placed its last offer on the table and then implemented it without the union's agreement.

Workers at the hotel are paid as much as $2 an hour less than they would receive for the same job at other hotels on the Strip, union officials said. The hotel has stopped making payments to the union's pension fund, and health insurance benefits are far below those received at other hotels covered by the Culinary Workers contract, the union said.