Hal Rothman on the evolution of unions in Southern Nevada

Sunday, Sept. 3, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.

Labor Day is one of my favorite holidays and not only because it means that the kids are finally back in school. I like the holiday because it expresses a fundamentally American way to get ahead, by banding together and building a community through cooperative endeavor.

Although we have all been weaned on the myth of American individualism, heroes like John Wayne create a fictional image, more appropriate to the movies than to the actual contours of the American experience. I love the characters he played and fully recognize their cultural importance, but they simply don't reflect the way the country was settled.

From Lewis and Clark to NASA and Microsoft, most of what Americans accomplished required people working together toward a common goal much more than it succeeded because of the effort of any individual. That is where unions come in.

Unions have been the American way for the working class to get ahead. They have battled for decent wages and safe working conditions, transformed immigrants into Americans, served as the way to launch the next generation toward college, and generally underpinned American prosperity.

Unions have had their share of problems, too. From the 1930s until the 1980s, American unions were tainted with the stench of organized crime. The two institutions grew up in concert, products of the ethnic urban environment. It took more than a generation of avid prosecution by the Justice Department to finally sever the ties. They have fought their battles with corrupt officials as well, but in the end, positive contributions outweigh any negatives.

Nevada's history with organized labor precedes statehood. The Comstock was home to the first unions in the Silver State, beginning a long tradition that even the passage of a right-to-work law in 1952 did not thwart. Unionism was so well established that open shop requirements failed to destroy organized labor in the Silver State. Since the 1950s, despite powerful reactionary opposition, it has become an even more important piece of the fabric of the state.

Unionism used to mean men with big arms and ethnic surnames with lots of consonants swinging hammers and pouring hot molten steel. They were immortalized in post-World War II America, when trade unionism reached its apex in the U.S.

They did what most Americans long recognized as work, a series of discrete and interactive tasks requiring mechanical skill and dexterity and not incidentally involving cooperation. These took place in shared space, communally used but belonging to someone else, usually "the company." They occurred in a consistent orderly time-bound fashion. The day began and ended with the stroke of a clock and a punch card that "kept your time," as the phrase went, accounting for a worker's hours.

Here was a clearly defined world of labor and production with signs and symbols to mark it, with conventions and codes all its own. It's gone now.

Work has become something different in the last 20 years. Look at what you own. We no longer make much of it in this country. Seventy percent of American jobs were in manufacturing in 1970; in 2000 only 28 percent remained in that sector. That change destroyed the old world of work and the trade unions that depended on it.

The unions of today have their own character. They are no longer predominantly trade unions. Now service unions make up the bulk of membership in Nevada and elsewhere. Instead of men, the largest are dominated by women. They are still filled with different surnames, but instead of Eastern European they are now Latino. Unions remain an essential building block of American society.

Southern Nevada's unions remain a formidable force in our politics and life. Headed by Local 226 of the Culinary Union, now more than 55,000 strong, they advocate for the interests of workers and those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Las Vegas remains the most heavily unionized city in America. This is quite an achievement considering that the local workforce has grown substantially and much of the growth is outside of the resort industry. It is a testament to the persistence of working people, a tribute to the collective spirit that built this country. The unions of today are building a better future for themselves and for the rest of us. The middle class of tomorrow will spring from their efforts.