Riviera company sues union

Tuesday, June 18, 2002 | 11:25 a.m.

KR Entertainment Inc., producer of the musical "Splash" at the Riviera's showroom on the Las Vegas Strip, sued to recover $134,861 in damages over alleged contract violations by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) and Union Local 720.

KR, which said IATSE and Local 720 represents KR's stagehands, assistant stage employees, spotlight operators and projectionists, wardrobe attendants, and stagehand and wardrobe heads of departments, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court on Friday.

IATSE, which has two five-year collective bargaining agreements with KR's stage crew employees and wardrobe employees, allegedly failed to comply with KR's requests on Nov. 27 and Jan. 7 to provide copies of the union's contracts with several other "entities providing entertainment in a hotel/motel-casino showroom in Las Vegas or Clark County within a 12-mile radius of the Las Vegas City Hall."

KR, which said the union finally provided copies of the documents on Feb. 13, said it discovered numerous hotels, including Bally's, Sahara and Tropicana, have signed collective bargaining agreements providing "lower wages to stage hands and wardrobe employees than the minimum amounts that KR had been required to pay for the past five years."

"Comparable agreements with Circus Circus, Excalibur, Flamingo, Las Vegas Hilton and Luxor permit those hotels to pay lower wages for their stagehand employees than the pay rates required in the union's agreement for stage crew employees with KR," the suit said.

KR said it incurred significant losses because it was "deprived of information to enable it to decide whether to exercise a contractual right to replace its (two) agreements with the more favorable wage rates contained in the other agreements."

Union representatives could not be reached for comment on KR's allegations.