Hotel-Culinary teamwork might stave off walkout

Cristina Rodriguez

Monday, May 1, 2006 | 7:24 a.m.

Today's boycotts are not expected to heavily impact Las Vegas' unionized resorts.

Hotel operators and the city's biggest union, the 60,000-member Culinary, announced plans Wednesday for workers to express their solidarity with immigrants without walking off their jobs for the day - and risking discipline and disruption of resort business.

Planned instead are mass petition signings and a major rally in support of immigrants at 6 p.m. under the canopy on Fremont Street.

Culinary officials say half of the union's members are immigrants. About 40 percent of the membership is Hispanic, although not all are immigrants.

The Culinary's top local official, Secretary-Treasurer D. Taylor, said Friday that he expects most union members who are scheduled to work will report today.

But a few won't, he said.

"It's a very emotional issue," Taylor said. "Even if you're documented, you have family and friends who are not."

Taylor said the resort industry and the Culinary have long been allies on the immigration issue.

"The hospitality industry has always been a gateway for immigrant workers. Immigrant Irish and Italians founded our union. And the industry is fully supportive of our immigration position."

The union supports a direct path to citizenship for all immigrants, reunification for families separated by national borders and measures to protect immigrant workers from being taken advantage of.

Taylor said the union and resorts have been allies on many other meaningful issues.

The Culinary supported industry efforts to fight a federal casino excise tax and scuttle an Internal Revenue Service plan to tax free meals for hotel workers. Union leaders testified on behalf of the industry before the National Problem Gambling Impact Study Commission, and in 2003, union and casino leaders pressured the Nevada Legislature in a failed try to pass a broad-based business tax.

Be it tax policy or image, the contract-time adversaries know that sometimes two flexed arms are stronger than one.

Academic experts say the cooperative relationship stands out on the national scene, even if it's not unique on a historic scale.

"It depends on the philosophy of the employer, the philosophy of the union, and how established the union is," said Richard Hurd, a labor studies professor at Cornell University. "If you look through the past 50 years, certainly there are times where in certain industries there are very collaborative relationships, (such as) the steel industry of the 1970s."

Rutgers University labor economist Eileen Appelbaum said Las Vegas is often cited as a model for other places.

She noted that a cooperative relationship exists between New York City hospitals and their union workers. The union helps train workers and supports hospitals when they struggle for compensation from insurance companies or the state.

Appelbaum said industry-union cooperation develops when employers are willing to form a coalition.

"They're not competing with each other by driving down workers' wages, they are improving efficiency, expanding markets and competing with each other based on quality and the characteristics of services they offer," she said.

Sometimes cooperation between union and management is a trade-off. In Los Angeles, hotel companies have agreed to not hire anti-union consultants if the union helps with lobbying, said Ruth Milkman of UCLA.

"This is not a new phenomenon. In the past, prior to 1980, it was much more common," said Milkman, director of the UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations.

The most effective relationships between unions and management seem to be when the industry is in danger, Hurd said. He gave the example of the textile or steel industries trying to protect themselves from imports.

Now the gaming and health industries team up with organized labor to fight for favorable government treatment.

"The more regulated the industry, the more important the government is in that industry, either in funding or in regulations, the more likely it is that union and management will work together," Hurd said.