Culinary Union gets prepared for strike

Friday, April 26, 2002 | 10:58 a.m.

The Culinary Union, embroiled in tough contract negotiations with the casino industry, is mobilizing its 50,000 members for a possible strike on June 1.

Not since the failed talks that led to the 75-day Strip walkout in 1984 has the union made such serious strike preparations.

D. Taylor, the union's newly elected secretary-treasurer, said Thursday that members are being urged to vote May 16 to authorize a strike if a new collective bargaining agreement with some 36 casinos can't be reached by the June 1 expiration of the current five-year contract.

The vote will take place during a general membership meeting, which is expected to attract thousands, at the Thomas & Mack Center, Taylor said.

In the past two weeks, the union has held its first round of talks with the four major casino companies looking to renew a contract -- Park Place Entertainment, Mandalay Resort Group, MGM MIRAGE and Harrah's Entertainment. A new round of discussions is scheduled the week of May 8.

Culinary leaders are pushing for a shorter two-year contract and continued free health insurance for their members. But the casinos are looking for a longer contract, as much as five years, and want employees to contribute money toward health insurance.

On Wednesday, at a meeting with some 1,700 union operatives involved in the negotiations, union leaders passed out a strongly worded question and answer sheet explaining what will happen if a walkout occurs.

"This industry cannot handle a city-wide strike," the two-page sheet said. "However, we must be prepared to strike for as long as it takes to win our free health benefits and keep our strong union."

The sheet encourages members to avoid make large purchases in the coming days and inform their creditors that they may be on strike by June 1.

"The best way to win a strike is to have a huge turnout for the May 16 strike vote," the union literature said. "We will win by demonstrating to these Wall Street controlled companies that we have the guts to fight for our union, our families and our future.

"We will win by demonstrating our fight throughout the nation -- to travel agents, convention planners, tour groups, financial analysts, bondholders, stockholders, politicians and clergy. We will be a force to reckon with."

Taylor said the union expects to stand firm in its demand for continued free health insurance and has little desire to negotiate a longer contract.

"Our members took a gigantic hit after Sept. 11 and now the casinos are asking them to take another hit, as clearly business is back," he said. "Why should they be victims twice, particularly in the environment where the compensation package of the executives has not gone down?"

The union's hard line is not sitting well with management.

"I don't think that having that kind of discussion at the outset of a negotiation is helpful," said Mike Sloan, general counsel for the Mandalay Resort Group, which met with the union earlier this week. "It undercuts the whole notion of a negotiation.

"If we're in a situation of taking or leaving ultimatums, then I think we've got a problem. But if they're going to negotiate as they have in the past, then I think we'll reach a compromise solution."

Taylor said the casinos are playing their Sept. 11 hand too strongly in the discussions.

"What's clear in many people's eyes is they're using Sept. 11 as an excuse to have workers take further hardship and sacrifice, and that's not acceptable," he said.

But Sloan said the casinos have legitimate business concerns, primarily trying to keep up with skyrocketing health care costs.

"They're seeking the biggest one-time increase in the history of our negotiations at a time when the gaming industry has had one of the worst years it has ever had," he said.

Sloan explained that his company tried to educate the union this week about the current "economic facts of life" at his company, which owns five major Strip resorts, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"We showed them that our revenues were down," he said. "And even though our revenues were down, we had reduced the compensation packages of our executives, supervisors and managers by $6 million and we had given them (the employees) a pay raise and increased contribution to their health plan."

Sloan said Taylor and other union leaders are "dead wrong" when they claim the industry has returned to being as profitable as it was before Sept. 11.

"No one in their right mind can say we're back to the way we were," he said.

And Sloan hinted that the union's strike talk could backfire and force the casinos to dig in for the long haul.

"It may further their own agenda, but they're going to motivate some employers into other kinds of preparations," he said.