Unions rally workers in Vegas

By Liz Benston

Tuesday, July 22, 2003 | 11:05 a.m.

At its first Las Vegas convention Monday, one of the fastest-growing unions in the country celebrated recent gains, pledged to grow its Las Vegas membership and vowed to lend greater support to the Culinary Union's effort to organize local hotel and restaurant employees.

"To the naysayers who say the labor movement can't rise again ... UNITE ain't dying and backing down," Bruce Raynor, president of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees, told thousands of union members at the start of a week-long convention.

UNITE is aggressively courting workers as other unions have stagnated in recent years, attracting 56,000 new members nationwide since the company's last convention four years ago in Miami, Raynor said.

The union has set even more ambitious goals over the next four years, aiming to increase membership by at least 100,000 people and to set more money aside for reserves. The group expects to increase union dues to help fund the effort, while it also will cut costs in other areas, such as trimming its executive board, Raynor said.

The union has supported workers who have been on strike for as long as a year or more, he said.

"We don't let anyone get starved out," he said.

UNITE chose Las Vegas for its third convention -- an event held every four years -- because of the town's strong union roots and its expanding membership base, organizers said Monday.

The group has 250,000 members in the United States and Canada and has organized about 4,000 workers in Las Vegas over its 10-year history. By comparison, the Culinary Union has decades of organizing experience and now represents about 50,000 Las Vegas workers -- the union's largest local in the country.

UNITE members include laundry workers who clean linens for the city's casino resorts as well as distribution center workers for manufacturing companies. Most union members work in North Las Vegas, where many of of the valley's industrial laundries and manufacturing plants are located. Major companies include Mission Industries, which employs about 1,600 union members, and Flamingo Laundry, which employs another 400 or so members.

The union is now settling in for some tougher fights in Las Vegas and beyond, organizers say.

For the past few months, UNITE has tried to organize about 120 workers at Al Phillips the Cleaner Inc. Al Phillips is part of a national laundry chain that has more than 15 retail stores in Las Vegas and also cleans uniforms for several Strip resorts.

Over the past few weeks, workers have picketed the company's central Las Vegas plant as well as its retail stores over claims that Al Phillips violated a pledge that the company would recognize the union if a majority of workers indicated their support.

Al Phillips workers have no health care, no pensions and work at "poverty-level" wages, Raynor said.

"The company thought (workers) wouldn't survive in this heat," he said, referring to the picketers.

The company has said it will recognize the union through a traditional secret-ballot vote rather than through the union's preferred "card check" petition-signing procedure.

Organizers say a majority of workers have already signed the petition in support of the union.

Delegates from UNITE locals nationwide will be joining Al Phillips protesters in Las Vegas during the convention, they said. Protesters were expected to gather early this morning in front of Al Phillips' central plant.

The union also is working to organize workers nationwide at Cintas Corp., the country's largest laundry chain. At least 75 people work for Cintas in Las Vegas, organizers say. The union recently announced a partnership with the Teamsters union that aims to organize Cintas' 17,000 or so workers. The Teamsters wants to represent laundry truck drivers, while UNITE would represent laundry workers.

The convention coincides with a Culinary Union rally Wednesday afternoon in front of the Aladdin casino hotel. The Culinary has wanted to organize Aladdin hotel workers for years, though a recently-completed bankruptcy sale to a new owner has impeded the process. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, scheduled to speak to UNITE members Wednesday, will lead a march of union workers to the Aladdin.

Actor Danny Glover and AFL-CIO President John Sweeney also are expected to speak to UNITE delegates Wednesday.

Laundry workers and hotel and restaurant employees have a complementary relationship whereby laundries clean employee uniforms and linens for hotels, John Wilhelm, president of the Hotel Employees & Restaurant Employees Union (Culinary Union), told UNITE members Monday.

Wilhelm said he was "inspired" by UNITE's organizing efforts in recent years and said the Culinary will benefit by having "another aggressive local organizing partner."

"Like UNITE, HERE is a fighting union," said Wilhelm, a former western regional director for the Culinary Union. "Like UNITE, HERE is looking for new ways to organize in the face of labor laws that don't work."

Both union leaders blamed President George Bush's tax cuts for the country's economic woes, saying the plan favored millionaires at the expense of blue-collar workers already scraping by at the poverty level.

The Iraq war, the SARS epidemic and the "disastrous Bush economy" have created a "perfect storm" that has cost the country thousands of jobs, Wilhelm said.

"George Bush is the most dangerous president we've had in our lifetime," Raynor added.

UNITE has gained recognition for its aggressive and sometimes unorthodox campaigning.

One effort involved a campaign to organize workers at Indiana fulfillment centers for Brylene, a retail catalogue company owned by a French retail conglomerate that owns several high-fashion brands. UNITE organizers picketed Gucci boutiques, staged a "fashion show" in New York using injured workers and prepared a clothing "catalogue" featuring photos of Asian sweatshop workers.

During another organizing effort at Linens of the Week, a rental company in Washington D.C., organizers picketed in front of upscale restaurants served by the company and handed out leaflets with pictures of rats that workers claimed they saw at the laundry. The union also bought rats in cages to use during the protests and took pictures of people entering the restaurants.

Both companies have since signed union contracts. During this morning's scheduled protest at the Al Phillips plant, workers were expected to use large puppets to demonstrate working conditions on the job. Workers at the convention said they face dangers at the plant, are forced to work through lunch breaks and are pressured to meet unrealistic production standards. During Monday's speeches, Al Phillips workers paraded around the convention center with starched shirts stuck to poles. Workers had written the words "intimidation" and "no respect" on the shirts.