Where I Stand — D. Taylor: Labor is alive and well

Friday, Aug. 31, 2001 | 4:01 a.m.

Editor's note: The Where I Stand guest columnist today is D. Taylor, staff director of the Culinary Union.

IT'S NO SURPRISE that as corporate America and its political allies continue their nonstop march to relegate the labor movement to obscurity, many Americans have come to think of Labor Day as just another day off.

But those plotting labor's demise should think twice before planning the funeral prematurely. While it is true that many Americans, including working people, don't celebrate the true meaning of the Labor Day holiday, the labor movement is far from dead.

After all, any movement whose history has been built upon events known as the "Ludlow Massacre," the "Memorial Day Massacre" and "Bloody Thursday," must have some resilience. These are but a few of the scores of battles in the early days of the American labor movement where workers gave their lives simply for the right to organize unions.

While that may be interesting history to some, the question will surely be asked: In today's dot.com world, are unions still relevant?

Despite one of the longest economic booms in our nation's history, wages for ordinary working Americans had actually been stagnating for much of the last three decades

The number of working Americans without health insurance continues to grow. In Nevada, we have the distinction of being one of the states with the highest percentage of uninsured. We spend about $12 million of taxpayer money annually in Clark County subsidizing health care costs for Wal-Mart and other companies that refuse to provide their employees with affordable family health care coverage.

While the booming economy had been creating millionaires and billionaires at an unprecedented rate, the number of low-income, largely service-sector jobs, has increased exponentially.

We think the answer to low wages, no benefits and unequal incomes in our community is through organizing into a union.

Fortunately for our community, much of this service-sector job growth has occurred in the unionized gaming industry. The 50,000 members of the Culinary Workers Union have jobs with decent pay, full medical benefits and a pension when they retire.

Las Vegas has shown that service-sector jobs don't have to drag a community down. Our members have a chance to own homes and send their kids to college. The wages and health care dollars spent by our members have helped make Las Vegas the economic success that it is.

One only needs to look as far as Reno or Laughlin to see the effect of low-wage jobs on a community. Towns in Nevada that are predominantly non-union where low-pay, no-benefit jobs are the norm rather than the exception.

The standard of living established by our union has become a benchmark that even anti-union employers, like the Venetian, must attempt to match.

Not too long ago, we were involved in an organizing drive with about 500 workers employed by a large national restaurant corporation. These workers were employed in restaurants and food service outlets inside a major hotel-casino.

When we asked the workers why they wanted to organize a union, one of them came forward holding his two last paychecks. The two paychecks covered more than 90 hours of work. His take-home pay for two weeks of work was $1.63. You see, this big corporate employer had deducted more than $400 for the cost of health insurance.

Workers should not have to choose between taking their kids to the doctor or putting food on the table. And the more successful unions are in organizing, the whole community benefits with better jobs, better pay and a better quality of life.