Labor uses Vegas as a model city

Sunday, Oct. 24, 1999 | 10:16 a.m.

A day before Vice President Al Gore received the AFL-CIO endorsement in Los Angeles last week, he was in Las Vegas.

Gore's meeting with a broad cross section of Las Vegas union leaders before paying homage to the country's most powerful labor organization was no accident, and illustrates the marriage of labor and politics in Southern Nevada.

Despite being in a "right-to-work" state that theoretically chains labor's clout, Las Vegas has become the national model for organizing for the AFL-CIO and affiliated unions.

Labor unions also are flexing their muscles in the political arena.

In the last year organized labor has chalked up some impressive successes:

Those successes have earned the praise of national AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, who calls the valley's recent labor history "a national model for organizing."

The local success stories also represent a new example for unions in the country, one that shifts the focus from old smokestack industries concentrated in the Northeast to service jobs that are springing up at a rate of 2 million a year across the country.

"Clearly job growth in this economy has been primarily in the service sector ... We've been very pleased with the organizing results," says Kirk Adams, AFL-CIO national organizing director. That organizing success is in the hotel-casinos, in the hospitals and health care institutions and throughout other industries in the booming Clark County service sector.

Adams puts the number of dues-paying union members in Southern Nevada at over 130,000. According to the latest job-force numbers from the state Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation, that would be about one out of six workers in the metropolitan area.

Assume that those union workers are supporting families, and you get a rough idea that many, many people are dependent on unionized paychecks in the region.

And those numbers are the key to the success of the unions, says Clark County Commission Chairman Bruce Woodbury.

Political force

"The unions have had quite a bit of influence and clout because they've always had a large following," he says.

"They are a force to be reckoned with," agrees UNLV political science professor Timothy Fackler. "The 'right-to-work' law is an obstacle for union organizing, but the unions have nonetheless been able to sustain major organizing activity, particularly in casino operations."

The largest and most powerful of the dozens of unions in Southern Nevada is the Culinary Workers local. Adams says the 50,000-strong union is the fastest- growing local in the country.

The building-trades unions and the Service Employees International Union are also growing, thanks to aggressive organizing efforts.

Adams credits the Culinary's organizing success with giving local resort workers wages nearly 20 percent over those in other parts of the country.

The Culinary Union helped lead the fight against developing Supercenter Wal-Marts, which would sell both groceries and department-store goods.

Although the Arkansas-based company is suing to overturn the decision, the Clark County Commission vote that barred the "large box" Wal-Mart may represent a high-water mark for union power. Others, however, see the issue as just another skirmish in the long history of Las Vegas and labor.

From the start, union organizers have been in the valley and some business leaders have vociferously opposed their efforts. The Teamsters, Culinary and other unions came into the town during the first casino boom in the 1940s and 1950s.

In the 1960s and 1970s federal organized crime charges, investigations and prosecutions put an unwelcome spotlight on both Las Vegas and the region's labor movement. Some unions, particularly the Teamsters, saw a dramatic fall in the number of members.

But as organized crime in gambling was pushed out, so was the mob's influence in local unions, observers say.

With that history behind them, some believe that union power in the Las Vegas Valley is going to keep growing.

Local unions, particularly the Culinary, have had their share of organizing victories in the past decade. In 1997 the union won a bitter, six-year strike at the former Frontier hotel-casino on the Strip when pro-union business interests bought the casino.

Through the 1990s, Culinary has grown from about 25,000 dues-paying members to about 42,000 now, D. Taylor, the union's staff director, said. Under collective bargaining rules the union represents about 8,000 more workers who haven't signed union cards.

But not everything is rosy for the Culinary. The union is now locked into another blood feud with developer Sheldon Adelson and the management at the Venetian hotel-casino. The struggle doesn't appear any closer to resolution today than when it erupted a year ago.

The union received another blow when Dallas-based Premier Interval Resorts decided to close the 800-room Maxim hotel-casino by Dec. 6, putting 791 employees out of work.

Ed Nigro, the casino executive who's been running the hotel-casino for nearly two years, says Premier is shutting down the Maxim to break labor agreements with the Culinary and five other unions -- despite concessions that the unions granted the financially ailing hotel-casino that helped keep the establishment open for the last two years.

Anti-union moves come as no surprise to union leaders, says Danny Thompson, secretary-treasurer of the Nevada AFL-CIO.

"We will always have our enemies. They'll always be there and we've learned to live with that," Thompson says. "What we will do is represent our members and their interests, and that's not going to change."

Chuck Muth, chairman of the Nevada Republican Liberty Caucus, does not temper his criticism of the labor movement.

"They're anti-business, they're anti-free market and in a lot of things they do today, they're anti-American," Muth says. Muth is leading a group, "Citizens for Competition," gathering petition signatures to overturn the commission ban on the Wal-Mart Supercenter store.

Muth is vocal in his criticism of unions throughout the valley's industries.

He is critical of trade unions and their effort to stop public contracts from the county and school district from being awarded to companies with bad safety records, arguing that the contracts will go exclusively to union shops at higher bids.

"Taxpayers pick up the tab for that," he says.

Muth saves some of his strongest criticism for the Culinary -- and for hotel-casino management that he believes cozies up to the union.

The generally friendly relationship between the union and casinos also draws criticism from some inside the labor movement.

Andrew Barbano, a longtime labor activist now living near Reno and a Communications Workers of America member, has crossed with Culinary over a bill sponsored by state Sen. Joe Neal that would have limited the casinos' ability to contribute to political campaigns.

Culinary and the AFL-CIO both opposed the move. Labor also had waged a war to block efforts to limit the ability of unions to get member contributions for political campaigns.

The relationship between Culinary and most hotel-casinos illustrates the guiding principal of local labor -- pragmatism, according to UNLV professor of political science and state Sen. Dina Titus.

Culinary and other unions are willing to go against traditional union positions when it is in their best interest, the Las Vegas Democrat says.

Neal, who represents North Las Vegas, says he generally received support from unions until his aborted effort to win the Democratic nomination for the governor's seat.

Neal, a former member of Culinary and United Steelworkers of America, says that in the state's legislative arena, "labor unions are not strong." He believes that they can affect some issues, but they "lose every time in opposition to the casinos."

"They're more powerful in the valley because they can turn out bodies ... that's about the only power," he says.

That's still a formidable power.

In a state that is almost equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, a third party with the ability to get the votes out can make a difference. Danny Thompson, AFL-CIO state secretary-treasurer, says labor will continue to make a difference, especially in elections.

Culinary also plans to redouble its efforts to organize, especially in "neighborhood casinos" that have grown rapidly around the Las Vegas Valley and in the casinos in Northern Nevada, says Taylor, the Culinary staff director. More strength in the north part of the state would give labor a better platform to move a statewide agenda.

Voting record

"I think we're in a better position to be heard than ever before," Thompson says. He says the unions don't tell people how to vote -- but they will knock on every union member's door to discuss the voting records of the candidates.

Neal, who represents many blue-collar workers in his district, says he still gets support from union members and works well with labor when it comes to "bread-and-butter issues."

Those bread-and-butter issues are the key to the union's political and organizing success, says state senator and Culinary member Maggie Carlton, who waits tables at the Treasure Island hotel-casino when she isn't working on legislative business.

Unions have brought her and her family a standard of living she could not find elsewhere with a comparable job, Carlton says.

Although she is married, Carlton says she knows a lot of single mothers who made careers as waitresses in the casino-resorts -- careers that provided homes, cars and college educations for their sons and daughters.

But Carlton says the biggest contribution is in medical benefits to thousands of resort workers.

"Health care. That is the most significant contribution that unions can give their members," she says. "No parent should ever be put in a position of choosing to pay for groceries or to pay for their child's health care."

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