Columnist Jon Ralston: This breakup could get uglier

Friday, Nov. 30, 2001 | 3:53 a.m.

Jon Ralston hosts the public affairs program "Face to Face" on Las Vegas ONE and also publishes the Ralston Report. His column for the Sun appears on Sundays and Wednesdays. Ralston can be reached at 870-7997 or by e-mail at ralston@vegas.com

AS A NEW YEAR beckons, a new day is dawning for the economy of Southern Nevada and its preeminent industry. And amid a confluence of shrinking profits in the wake of Sept. 11, rising costs, especially in health care, and a growing perception that the resorts are about as sensitive as sandpaper to their employees, the next year promises to be contentious and potentially destructive.

And if economics often drive politics, then the coming temblor and its aftershocks could leave the governmental and financial landscape at the least changed and perhaps ravaged.

Paradoxically, on the eve of a campaign year in which the status quo in Nevada would seem poised to be reaffirmed, rarely have there been so many factors (and I'm not even including escalating power rates) that so threaten to destabilize the political system. And also paradoxically, on the one hand labor and management are working together to stem rising health care costs but are presaging a game of brinkmanship on contracts that expire in May. To wit:

* Quietly but effectively, a coalition has been organizing behind the scenes that could revive memories of 1987, when hospital cost-containment was the issue of the day. With union workers enjoying superb benefits and resorts having to pay them, both sides have an interest in seeing that health care costs in the valley go down. So as negotiations begin with the valley's hospitals, which were pilloried nearly 15 years ago by then-Gov. Richard Bryan as a predatory oligopoly, a formidable, symbiotic alliance has formed.

With the Bob Miller administration allowing the Bryan cost-containment law to sunset, this is the first round of bargaining without any government protections. So to bulk up their clout, various unions and private employers are acting as a unit to put the hospitals on notice that they expect not to be gouged. The group, calling itself the Health Care Services Purchasing Coalition, has more than 300,000 members. It includes the Culinary, police, fire and education unions as well as union-friendly employers such as Mandalay Resort Group, Park Place Entertainment and MGM MIRAGE.

With as many as 20,000 workers laid off and the companies strapped to pay for ballooning health care costs, the coalition came together naturally. And it will not just use their amalgamated numbers at the bargaining table to get what they want. The coalition obviously also has some financial resources to bring to bear and plans to commence a public relations campaign before the end of the year to lay the groundwork for the conflict to come.

* Although the unions and some of the employers are working together on health care, overall labor-management relations are falling into a valley not seen since the devastating 1984 strike. With Steve Wynn without any employees and not presenting a union-friendly face to the industry, the events of Sept. 11 have produced a perception of Scrooge-like public companies callously laying off workers and not having an ounce of charity.

It's not just that Wynn is gone. No one who heads the major companies now has the depth of the relationship that Wynn or the late Arthur Goldberg had with the unions. Some may be friendly, but the level of trust is not there.

The frostiness of labor-management relations is expected to make the incipient contract negotiations that much tougher, with some union folks hinting that the casinos have broken a bond with the Culinary that has proven mutually beneficial to both sides.

The union has helped the industry on Capitol Hill and in Carson City, and the gamers have reciprocated in their treatment of workers. That all changed on Sept. 11, and whatever goodwill had existed for years is now evaporating.

Workers are complaining to their leadership that the gamers are still making money and showing no compassion or outreach to their workers.

"It is a broken relationship," said one gaming insider. "A symbiotic relationship is now antagonistic."

Added one union official: "There has been more damage done to the employer-employee relationship in two months than could have been done in five years."

The problem for the gamers is that amid discussion of tax structure reform and possible new revenue, will anyone have any sympathy for them? And will the workers who stood up for the gamers when the National Gaming Impact Study Commission was doing its dog-and-pony-show across the country stand tall for the resorts if a gaming tax movement were to jell?

Hardly anyone believes that a strike, as there was in 1984, is possible as the contract negotiations begin in earnest after New Year's. But that new economic and political day that is dawning is quite overcast, and those clouds could bring a storm to Southern Nevada unlike any that has been seen in close to two decades.