No time for luxury

Michael J. Mishak, Las Vegas Sun

Saturday, July 14, 2007 | 7:04 a.m.

Sen. Barack Obama surveyed his spacious 44th-floor suite Friday, marveling at the over-the-top luxury. Outside was a spectacular view of the Strip.

"These rooms at Caesars Palace would have been great when I was 25," a smiling Obama told his two guests. "But when you're running for president this is all wasted on you. All you want to do is collapse on the pillow. It doesn't really matter what the room looks like."

And then: "The Super 8 in Iowa is terrific."

In fact, it was the hotel that mattered.

Obama met with two reporters after finishing talking with a small group from the Culinary Union, the 60,000-strong local representing Las Vegas hotel and restaurant service employees. The union, now in the midst of citywide contract talks, reached a settlement last month with Harrah's Entertainment, which owns Caesars.

That deal included the union's largest-ever wage and benefits package. It also continues to give the Culinary an easy "card check" method of organizing workplaces, including those managed by third-party operators.

Wages and benefits and card check are major sticking points in the union's ongoing talks with MGM Mirage, and workers involved with the Harrah's negotiations told Obama on Friday that nothing less than the union's future was at stake.

The following are excerpts from Obama's talks with Culinary and with reporters:

On the effect of private equity firms:

The central question in the U.S. economy is how we create shared burdens and shared benefits for everybody. What we're increasingly seeing as a consequence of all these things, international finance companies move wherever they want, they're creating enormous wealth but the social contract between workers and companies is being broken, and at the very least frayed.

On Las Vegas as a model:

One of the things about Las Vegas that I've always found attractive is it's got strong growth, strong development, and workers are getting part of the benefit. It's created good service. It's created opportunity. And it also, by the way, creates a more unified America.

Part of the reason that I think Vegas is a model for the future of the economy is that we know there's going to be a larger proportion of service jobs in the economy. It's not just due to outsourcing but technology. One of the central questions is figuring out how we make sure that service jobs pay a living wage. Las Vegas has figured that out. I think the rest of the country needs to figure it out. And if we can we're going to have a stronger economy and a more unified country.

What you saw in the immigration debate this last time around has to do with people's anxieties about their own economic futures. People, when they get anxious, are much more vulnerable to being pitted against each other. That's part of what we want to change.

I think that Las Vegas is on to a good thing, and what I want to do is tell that story throughout the country, about how workers and companies both prosper. But in order to tell that story effectively we have to make sure that both sides are doing their part.

On the Culinary Union's negotiations with MGM Mirage:

If this thing doesn't get resolved in a way that makes sense, I've already told you I got my hat and sun tan lotion ready Nobody wants to come to Las Vegas and see a strike. They want to come to Las Vegas to have fun.

To the extent that I can lend support to the effort I'm happy to do it. It's something that I've done back in Illinois. Next week I'll be walking a picket line in front of (Chicago's) Congress Hotel. That's been the longest running fight for Unite Here (the Culinary's parent union ) across the country. It's been going on there for four years. I've walked the picket line there before and I'll do it again.