Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2005 | 10:51 a.m.
The Culinary Union has placed a price on its dispute with Boyd Gaming Corp. over its neutrality agreement involving three Coast Casinos properties: $1.9 million per month.
The Culinary says the company owes it for benefits the workers would have received if the company allowed the union to organize those workers under a neutrality agreement the union reached with the Stardust in 2002.
The union is demanding the money beginning in July 2004, when it first filed a grievance about the dispute, until the end of the contract in 2007. After the company refused to arbitrate the dispute, the union filed a lawsuit last August demanding that the neutrality agreement at the Stardust extend to the Gold Coast, the Suncoast and the Orleans.
From July 2004 to this month, the $1.9 million per-month tab would total $24.7 million -- a number that continues to rise as the dispute goes on.
Coast's only Strip casino, the Barbary Coast, already has a Culinary contract.
The company filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit in September, but the court rejected the motion.
The company then began filing unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, beginning in December, alleging the union's efforts to extend the Stardust's neutrality agreement to the Coast Casinos properties violates the National Labor Relations Act.
Representatives for both the union and the company declined to comment about the dispute.
However, Boyd Gaming Corp. mentioned the Culinary Union's $1.9 million per-month demand in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
In its filing Boyd questioned the validity of the Culinary demand, and promised to fight the union's efforts.
"Boyd believes these alleged damages are speculative," the company said in the document. "Boyd and (its subsidiary) Mare-Bear intend to vigorously defend the lawsuit filed by the union. Boyd does not anticipate that these matters will be finally resolved for a period of months or years. In the event Boyd, Mare-Bear and/or Coast are ultimately unsuccessful, monetary damages, if any, are impossible to estimate at this time."
In the company's motion to dismiss the complaint it noted that the Stardust agreement doesn't extend to workers at the company's other properties.
"The employer recognizes the union as the exclusive collective bargaining representative for the employer's employees employed at its facility as indicated in the first paragraph of this agreement, and excluding any persons working for the employer at any other facility, including those located in Clark County, Laughlin or Reno, Nevada or any subsequently acquired property not organized by the union," the agreement said.
The Culinary already represents Boyd workers at the Fremont and Main Street Station casinos in addition to the Stardust and Barbary Coast, but the union does not represent food-service workers and maids at Sam's Town, California, Joker's Wild and Eldorado as well as the three Coast Casinos properties named in the lawsuit.
Unions seek neutrality agreements with companies that say the employer will not interfere in the union's organizing drive. If the union gets a majority of workers to sign authorization cards the company will bargain with the union for a labor contract on behalf of those workers.
The NLRB is currently considering whether such agreements are legal and any neutrality-agreement-related cases, such as this one, are sent to its office in Washington D.C., said Steve Wamser, deputy regional attorney for the NLRB's Las Vegas office.
Union leaders argue the card check/neutrality agreement method is a less time-consuming and fairer way for workers to indicate their interest in a union's representation, compared with the NLRB-run secret ballot election. They say the card check allows workers to indicate their interest in organizing without having to deal with delaying tactics and companies' efforts to scare workers out of voting in favor of union representation.
Some business executives dislike the card check process, saying it allows organizers to make promises the union may not be able to make good on. As a result, workers make their decisions based on those promises. Business executives who dislike card check/neutrality agreements say they prefer the election process because it allows workers to make their decisions privately.
An election proved to be futile for the Culinary Union when it agreed to one with the Santa Fe. After negotiating with the property's owners for a contract the company was sold to Station Casinos, which remains non-union.
"We only had one election here, and we won it and we never got a contract," D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Union said in an interview earlier this year with the Sun's sister publication In Business Las Vegas. "We won and everybody got fired, and Station took over; we never got a contract."
The NLRB's Wamser said the election process works best.
"I guess the real question is how can you really determine the true intent of the employee?" he said. "We favor our own secret ballot elections. "
The card check has proven successful for the Culinary Union in recent organizing drives. The union used the card check to organize workers at the Aladdin and Wynn Las Vegas. Both companies are involved in negotiations with the union to reach labor contracts on behalf of such workers as cooks, maids and servers.
David Rosenfeld is an Alameda, Calif.-based lawyer who works for unions including the Laborers Local 872, but is not involved in the Culinary lawsuit. He said the NLRB is seeking ways to limit the ability of unions to turn to the card check/ neutrality agreement as a form of organizing.
"I think the current Republican appointees to the board would do everything they could to establish a precedence if they could," Rosenfeld said. "I believe neutrality agreements and card checks are good for workers because they don't have the uncertainties and delay of an election."
Rosenfeld said case law about the legality of neutrality agreements is on the side of the union.
"There's a lot of history of enforcing these things in the courts so I would expect the union would win that battle," he said. "That union has been successful at winning those battles."
The union was able to organize the Rio because of a Clark County District Court judge's 2001 order that forced the property's buyer, Harrah's Entertainment Inc., to recognize a card count there.
Howard Cole, an employers' lawyer at Lionel, Sawyer & Collins, said just because the Culinary Union was able to win a similar dispute at the Rio, it doesn't necessarily follow that they'll win this one. He said the two cases are different.
"It's worth a shot by the Culinary to see if they can convince the court that precedence would apply," Cole said. "The facts of the Harrah's case are inapplicable. The document speaks for itself. Plain reading says it doesn't apply to after-acquired properties. I believe they will ultimately be unsuccessful."
One informed industry source said when companies agree to neutrality agreements at one property it opens them to the risk of being forced into allowing their other work sites to be unionized.
"What happens at A could affect B, C and D," the source said. "Is it lawful to insist on neutrality at other establishments when it's the employees at A that really matter?"
The source disagreed with Rosenfeld's assessment of the card check/neutrality agreement process.
"The argument against card recognition I think it's a valid argument," the source said. "You don't know what the union organizer told the employees when they signed the card. Ultimately the statute gives the right, not to the union, not to the employer, but to the employee. Card recognition, in some extent, takes that away."
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