7. The Spirit of '76

Vegas at Odds: Labor Conflict in a Leisure Economy, 1960–1985

No 7
The Spirit of ’76

In 1976, as the nation observed its bicentennial, thirteen thousand Las Vegas workers struck fifteen major resorts. The strikers were from four unions whose contracts with the Nevada Resort Association (NRA) had expired simultaneously. Employees from other unions refused to cross the picket lines, which helped force a dozen of the struck resorts to shut down, throwing ten thousand nonunion employees out of work. The strike lasted sixteen days and took a sharp, temporary toll on the local economy as well as the striking workers. It affected almost all commercial enterprises in Las Vegas, and tax collections in the city and county. As it dragged on, striking employees grew increasingly militant and law enforcement officials increasingly resistant to breaches of the peace.

The strike was a major episode in the city’s history, as well as that of its tourist industry and its labor relations. It grew out of a clash of wills between management and labor less over wages and working conditions than over more fundamental matters relating to control of the workplace and the right of union workers to honor picket lines of unions other than their own. The strike’s timing and intensity show that, after national corporations took control of the resort industry, labor relations in Las Vegas became structurally adversarial. The growing size and centrality of the industry to the city and state economy meant that any serious disruption in it represented a grave concern to the region itself. As a result, public officials eventually intervened in the dispute and helped resolve it, something that had never before happened.

The strike took place against ongoing changes in the national economy that were eclipsing the strength of organized labor. This national picture applied chiefly to heavy manufacturing and extractive industries, which had begun secular stages of decline that little affected a service industry like Las Vegas tourism. That industry was strong in the mid-1970s. Between 1970 and 1976, annual visitor counts for the area had risen by more than a third, to nearly ten million, and tourist spending more than doubled, to $2.5 billion. Yet industry managers worried about the future. The nation’s first “oil shock” had increased the cost of travel and put downward pressure on major barometers of the industry’s well-being, including projections of growth in revenue and visitor expenditure. The oil shock fueled inflation and economic uncertainties in an industry dependent on discretionary spending. Moreover, the leisure and recreation business had grown more competitive. Urban renewal was rejuvenating cities, making them again attractive to tourists, while new amusement parks, ocean cruises, and outdoor and sports-related tourism, as well as foreign travel, challenged Las Vegas for the tourist dollar. Even in Southern Nevada, alternatives to gambling and the glitz of Las Vegas were now widely available.¹

The threat of competition from Atlantic City, New Jersey, was particularly worrisome. In the mid-1970s, Nevada was still the only place in the nation for legal gambling, but several states and localities were exploring gambling as a possible tourist attraction and cure for economic problems and thus a source of revenue. In 1974 New Jersey voters narrowly rejected a ballot initiative to legalize gambling in Atlantic City, an aging seaside community once known for its appeal to vacationers from New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. A coalition of influential business and civic leaders promised to put the measure before the voters again, and insiders in the gaming business in and out of Las Vegas expected it to pass. Casino gambling in the middle of the heavily populated East Coast would obviously have implications for Las Vegas. Atlantic City already rivaled Las Vegas as a convention site, and gambling there would no doubt siphon off high-spending conventioneers from Las Vegas. That possibility had prompted the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to launch an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at the convention market. “We must dismiss thoughts of complacency,” the authority said of its marketing strategies. “Our job is to stay number one.”²

Resort managers on the Strip needed no such incentives to get tough with their unionized employees. Executives at the six Summa properties, which Howard Hughes still owned, as well as Caesars Palace, the MGM Grand, the Hilton properties, and other major resorts were already committed for reasons of their own to bringing what they considered order, efficiency, and proper management control of the workforce in the resort industry. Like corporate managers everywhere, they believed in the supremacy of capital over labor, of managers over workers, and saw unions as obstacles to the achievement of their goals. For them, dealing with unions was a problem to be managed and constrained, not a cooperative economic and social endeavor to be addressed equitably.³

Correspondence between executives within these companies shed light on this outlook. In 1973 Henri Lewin of the Hilton Corporation complained to corporate headquarters that his employees acted too independently and that union work rules prevented him from improving services and holding down labor costs. “Labor problems occur on a daily basis,” Lewin groused. “In some areas you can’t even tell a man to cut his hair.” To solve such “problems,” Lewin asked for a “capable man” to handle “union negotiations, union grievances, and other day-today personnel matters.” “I recommend that one of the strongest labor men be put in Las Vegas on a full-time basis.” He added, “This would save money as well as give us the respect we should have.”⁴ Law and the realities of union strength in Las Vegas discouraged Lewin from calling for straightforward confrontation with workers and unions, and thus he embraced a strategy of calculation and maneuver, which required two or three cycles of contract negotiations—six to nine years—to achieve most of what he wanted.

Despite this evolution in management thinking, industrial relations remained peaceful in early 1976, when negotiations commenced to renew the three-year contracts signed in 1973. Those contracts had been signed without a work stoppage and with relatively general increases in wages and benefits for union employees. As a result, those employees were earning 30 to 40 percent more than they had earned in 1970, and they had comparable improvements in benefits and job security, along with employee-friendly grievance procedures.⁵

The situation among housekeepers illustrated these improvements. From 1970 to 1976, their wages increased more than 50 percent (from $16.90 to $25.80 per shift), and employer contributions to their health and welfare funds rose nearly 90 percent. Like other union employees, they were guaranteed full-time employment, paid vacations, and seven paid holidays a year, as well as two full meals each workday. Pregnant women and new mothers could take leaves of absence as long as doctors certified their inability to return to work, and they had the right to return to their job classifications and shifts.⁶ These improvements, however, did little more than keep up with inflation. From 1970 to 1975, consumer prices in the nation as a whole increased 40 percent, nearly quadrupling the inflationary rate of the early 1960s. Energy and food prices rose dramatically in these years, as did the cost of health care, home ownership, and consumer goods.⁷

The resorts like their employees felt the resulting economic squeeze. The costs of doing business, including the cost of labor, rose as did inflation rates, and some resorts saw their profit margins decline or even disappear. The Summa Corporation, for example, lost a reported $100 million between 1971 and 1976, including $30 million in 1975 alone. Its smallest Las Vegas property, the Silver Slipper, had not shown a profit for several years, and the Castaways and the Landmark had barely broken even. Even the Desert Inn and the Sands, the most luxurious and profitable of the Summa properties, needed major refurbishments to remain competitive.⁸

These economic pressures weighed heavily on collective bargaining in 1976, influencing what unions could reasonably demand in wage and benefit increases, and what management felt it could afford in the face of the necessity to limit cost increases. Combined with management’s new determination to gain greater control over the workplace as well as hiring procedures, these circumstances pointed to a difficult round of negotiations on the part of both sides. In addition, management was now more than ever determined to limit workers’ right to honor picket lines of other workers and unions and to deny union employees the right to strike for the purpose of forcing employers to recognize new unions, especially unions of dealers and security guards.⁹

This last issue was especially urgent for both sides. In 1975 members of the Teamsters had honored picket lines at the Tropicana of sixteen striking security guards who belonged to a recently formed affiliate of the International Union of Police and Protection Employees. The union had won representation elections at several Strip resorts in the early 1970s, but a few of those properties, including the Tropicana, had refused to renew their contracts, which prompted the strike. The sympathetic action by “back-end” Teamster employees cut off not only food and beverage deliveries to the resort but also garbage collection, and it forced management to negotiate with the guards and increase their pay and benefits.¹⁰

The NRA, which represented the Summa properties and other major Strip resorts, was especially determined to outlaw sympathy strikes in the next contract with the Culinary and Bartenders. The existing contracts, set to expire on March 10, required employees to cross picket lines only when the picketing was for “organizational purposes” or the result of a dispute between another employer and employees. They specifically ensured workers the right to respect the picket lines of established unions provided the Southern Nevada Central Labor Council sanctioned the strike of the picketing workers.¹¹

When bargaining talks opened in February, the NRA’s chief negotiator, William Campbell, began by insisting on prohibiting unionized employees from engaging in any “concerted economic activity” against the resorts that employed them during the life of the contract. Should any union employee violate the prohibition, he demanded, management must have the right “to lock out all members of the offending employee’s union.”¹² This would, of course, impose a major new restriction on the rights of unions and their members to protect their perceived interests, specifically the right to participate in sympathy strikes.

Campbell said the language he insisted on would do no more than prevent abuses of union power, especially by members of the Culinary or by the Culinary itself. Whenever another union calls a strike, one resort manager said at this point, the Culinary “threatens to pull all its people out of a single hotel in respect for the picket line and bring that one hotel to its knees.”¹³ That result was intolerable. Unless management had the power to lock out workers for refusing to cross picket lines, the Culinary would one day strike over the discharge of a single incompetent employee. “We need some leverage against every little union beef,” another management spokesman explained. “Why, the way things are, every union can go out on strike if management tries to fire a bartender who may be drunk three times in a row on the job.”¹⁴

Such statements trivialized the meaning of sympathy strikes and exaggerated the threat they posed. Sympathy strikes typically involved efforts to unionize unorganized workers—that is, workers in would-be or emergent unions opposed by management—not to reverse the firing of individual employees, for whatever reason.¹⁵ Union negotiators at once recognized the significance of the lockout proposal, their chief, Al Bramlet, calling it “totally unacceptable” and a “union-breaking scheme.”¹⁶ Bramlet’s assistant Jeff McColl told the press that to accept Campbell’s proposal would make the Culinary the “leper of southern Nevada labor.” “There’s no way we can talk about money,” McColl said adamantly, “when that clause is there.”¹⁷ Jack Stafford, head of the Bartenders agreed. His union would strike “as long as necessary” to protect the right to engage in sympathy strikes.¹⁸

Union negotiators were also unhappy with other NRA proposals. Rather than offering the customary three-year contracts with guaranteed annual pay raises, Campbell proposed a five-year contract that offered pay raises of 20 percent over the next three years plus additional wage increases determined by the behavior of the federal government’s Consumer Price Index. From management’s perspective, lengthening the terms of labor contracts promised to bring greater stability to the work environment and, by definition, reduce the likelihood of a work stoppage. “[The five-year contract] fortifies the industry with stability,” a representative of the Hilton properties explained. “We think that it guarantees uninterrupted work.”¹⁹ The justification for incorporating cost-of-living adjustments in the latter years of the proposed contract was that wages should rise—or fall—automatically with fluctuations in the cost of living. By the 1970s, many companies and unions in the manufacturing sector of the economy had negotiated such arrangements, including parties in the aircraft, automotive, railroad, and textile industries.

Far more alarming to union leaders were management’s proposals to reduce the guaranteed workweek for some workers from five to four days, to lengthen the list of reasons for which workers might be summarily discharged, and to subcontract or “outsource” to other firms some of the work currently done by kitchen workers, such as carving meat and preparing sauces. Moreover, they wanted more control of the job referral process, heretofore the exclusive prerogative of the unions. That process, employers claimed, prevented them from building up the labor reservoirs they needed to fill jobs quickly and often from hiring the best-qualified job candidates.²⁰

Union leaders instantly rejected these various proposals. The proposals, they recognized, rolled back major gains their unions had made in earlier years and failed to offset the effects of recent inflation on the real income of union members. Consumer prices had risen 11 percent in the past year alone, yet the wages of many union employees only 5 to 6 percent. If management wanted to lengthen the terms of labor contracts, it had to offer more hefty pay raises than those proposed and to increase its contributions to the unions’ retirement and health care programs. It also had to withdraw proposals to eliminate union jobs and work rules and to interfere in union hiring hall practices, which operated in ways that protected the rights and well-being of workers and their unions. Moreover, they needed to improve conditions of employment by offering new job perquisites, such as additional paid holidays, the extension of work breaks from ten to fifteen minutes, and more paid sick leave. Employers dismissed these suggestions as “unreasonable.” “We might as well close our doors,” NRA president Frank Scott said of them.²¹

Members of the musicians’ union, whose contracts with the NRA also expired on March 10, felt especially vulnerable in the 1976 negotiations. For three years the resorts and the musicians had disagreed over who actually employed lounge musicians.²² Unlike their counterparts in showrooms, who were on hotel payrolls, lounge musicians were hired by bandleaders who contracted with resorts for the services of their groups. Back in 1973, the NRA had tried to change this arrangement by making lounge musicians hotel employees like showroom musicians. Lounge musicians rejected the proposal because they thought it made them liable to the kind of treatment the resorts gave their other wageworkers, who had less control over their work routines. At issue were such things as rehearsal and work-break schedules and the right to enter the hotels through the front door rather than employees’ entrances. Bandleaders also disliked the proposed change because they preferred to make their own deals with sidemen concerning such things as what to wear and how to perform in given circumstances. Rebuffed in 1973, the NRA in 1976 refused to negotiate the terms and conditions of the employment of lounge musicians, insisting that that was the responsibility of bandleaders as independent contractors.²³

This NRA stance encouraged some bandleaders to consider forming their own collective bargaining unit. A group of bandleaders led by Charlie Peterson questioned whether the musicians’ union had the right to bargain on their behalf. They insisted that it was bandleaders who employed their musicians and that they should therefore bargain for themselves and their musicians. The NRA found this position encouraging because it promised to give musicians the status of employees of private contractors and thus remove the resorts from labor negotiations with the musicians’ union. “There would be no labor dispute between the hotels and the Musicians, but rather between the leader of an orchestra and the Union,” as NRA negotiator William Campbell recognized.²⁴ The result of this dispute was that the musicians’ union faced an internal revolt on the eve of the 1976 bargaining sessions. “Our own bandleaders were chewing us up and down,” as Mark Massagli of the union later recalled. “When the hotels heard about this, all they did is sit back and say ‘we don’t even know if we should be here with you.’”²⁵

The musicians’ union faced other problems, too. The recent conversion of a few casino lounges into gaming areas promised to eliminate many of the jobs bandleaders now fought to control. To remedy the situation, the musicians’ chief negotiator, Renny Ashleman, suggested that the union modify its wage proposals if resorts guaranteed more jobs for lounge musicians. Campbell rejected such a guarantee as “impractical.” Employers, he insisted, must have the “flexibility” to meet changing consumer demands.²⁶ Meanwhile, the use of taped music in resorts threatened the careers of orchestra musicians. The hotels now, in 1976, insisted on the right to use taped music during show rehearsals, thus eliminating the cost of musicians for that purpose. Dancers, NRA negotiators insisted, did not need an orchestra to practice their acts. This argument made sense to management, but to musicians it was a formula for reduced employment and income. That was threatening enough in itself, but it also tapped into long-standing fears that “mechanical” music threatened live musicians with obsolescence. Union leaders therefore rejected the proposal, insisting that “any deviation” from current agreements regarding taped music would be viewed as an effort to “diminish our work opportunities.”²⁷ Wages were another concern of the musicians. Ashleman insisted that musicians as well as stagehands get an immediate 20 percent wage hike as well as annual cost-of-living adjustments during the life of the new contract, a proposal that management saw as unjustified, unrealistic, and unnecessarily burdensome.²⁸

Despite the magnitude of these differences, the NRA and the unions negotiated in the customary fashion in 1976. As usual, the center of attention was negotiations with the Culinary and Bartenders, which in early February extended into lengthy daily sessions. Discussions with the lesser unions occurred irregularly, because both sides understood that the terms of the contracts with these unions depended upon the terms reached with the Culinary. Throughout the process, management negotiators stressed the need to remain competitive, the threat from legalized gambling in Atlantic City, and the costs of marketing Las Vegas and refurbishing its aging resorts. Union leaders, on the other hand, emphasized the financial problems of workers and vowed to protect their rights in the workplace and to honor picket lines.

By March negotiators had resolved a range of secondary issues but remained, as a union spokesperson put it, “miles apart on money,” on the length of the contract, on the subcontracting issue, and on management’s insistence on prohibiting union workers from honoring picket lines of unorganized workers.²⁹ There had also been no agreement on the special concerns of musicians and stagehands, whose union leaders told them to prepare to strike.³⁰

As the negotiations deadlocked, the local press called on both sides to reach an agreement “satisfactory to all,” reminding them that a strike would hurt employees and employers alike and “shatter” Las Vegas tourism. “The tourist industry is not one which can be shut down instantly and then cranked up again overnight,” the Review-Journal editorialized. “Conventions are scheduled in advance which cannot be cancelled because of labor disputes. Tourists who call off vacation plans when a strike is reported are not likely to reschedule their trip as soon as the workers are back on the job. Instead, they will take their business elsewhere.” A strike would thus “seriously tarnish the image of Las Vegas as an ideal vacation spot.”³¹

A flurry of last-minute efforts failed to break the deadlock. On the night of March 10, only hours before their contract expired, culinary workers met at the Las Vegas Convention Center to hear Bramlet denounce management’s final offers as “unacceptable.” By a three-to-one margin, the workers then gave Bramlet the authorization he requested to call a strike after twenty-four hours during which negotiators could make a “final attempt” to reach an agreement.³²

That night, the twelve hundred members of the musicians’ union went on strike, forcing the cancellation of all shows and musical entertainment in NRA properties, including performances of such entertainers as Sammy Davis Jr., Ann Margret, and Wayne Newton. Union representatives notified bandleaders around five o’clock that the strike was on, and the leaders informed their sidemen. A few lounge musicians began performances that evening but stopped when union representatives reminded them they could be fined and expelled from the union for scabbing. The union “slipped a few choice words in their ears, told them to finish the set and leave.” And they left.³³ Stagehands and wardrobe attendants immediately joined the striking musicians, and management announced the cancellation of showroom performances “until further notice.”³⁴

The two small unions had acted aggressively, but the fate of the impending strike was in the hands of the Culinary and Bartenders. Would these unions join the strike after the twenty-four-hour delay Al Bramlet had asked for? The answer was certainly yes once members of the Culinary had voted, for the two sides remained far apart not only on cost items but on sympathy strikes and the length of contracts. Most independent hotels, including the Riviera, the Aladdin, the Stardust, the Fremont, and the Hacienda, had already accepted the Culinary’s demands on cost items, which strengthened Bramlet’s unwillingness to settle for less with the NRA. There, the impasse remained when the Culinary’s twenty-four-hour wait-and-see period expired.³⁵

About eight o’clock on the evening of March 11, thousands of housekeepers, wait people, and kitchen and barroom workers began forming picket lines around the fifteen resorts represented by the NRA. In a show of solidarity, other union employees, including members of the Teamsters and the building trades, honored the picket lines. Yellow Cab Company drivers did likewise. With the help of supervisors and volunteer workers, the struck resorts remained open overnight to accommodate hotel guests, but the next day most of them shut down, putting about ten thousand nonunion employees, among them dealers, out of work. In all, the strike idled perhaps twenty-three thousand workers.³⁶

The tent-shaped Circus Circus, which Jay Sarno had turned over to William Bennett and William Pennington in 1974, vowed to remain open, as did Caesars Palace and the Dunes.³⁷ But they had to slash prices and curtail services to do so. They eliminated room service, closed their showrooms and restaurants, and used nonunion administrative personnel to check guests in and out. Guests had to carry their own luggage, make their own beds, and pick up fresh towels and otherwise fend for themselves. Charles and Peggy Balliro of Boston, who stayed at Caesars Palace during the strike, cleaned their own rooms, secured fresh towels and bed linen from nonunion pit bosses acting as bellhops, and did without phone service. When Peggy Balliro returned from a shopping trip by cab, the driver left her a hundred yards from the hotel because he refused to cross the picket line. “But what the hell?” her husband told a reporter, “The gambling and the sun are the same, and three times a day we get a free buffet, serviced by a hotel vice president!” Balliro’s wife demurred. “You owe me another vacation,” she told her husband.³⁸

The strike exasperated tourists, whose numbers declined swiftly. With a dozen major resorts closed, newly arriving tourists had trouble finding accommodations. Those who did so had to settle for whatever they could find, and had to do without the services, entertainment, and the like they had been expecting.³⁹ When reporters asked tourists how they felt about all this, most expressed disappointment. “It spoiled my whole vacation,” a Pennsylvania woman told reporters. “Everything is dead,” another tourist agreed; “all of our reservations were cancelled.”⁴⁰ A youth from Lovelock, Nevada, in Las Vegas with his high school basketball team, had the same reaction. “So far, it’s really disappointing. You only get here once a year and want to have all the fun you can.”⁴¹ A woman from Ft. Wayne, Indiana, was even more let down. “We had planned this trip a long time,” she told the press. “I’m disappointed we couldn’t see Wayne Newton.”⁴²

The strike also frustrated idled dealers, most of whom were paid during the strike but received no tips. Some of them grew angry. “I won’t be tipping these strikers when it’s over,” one dealer said, “at least not until I make back all this strike has cost me. I’ve always been a real George tipper, too.” Others expressed support for the strike, but worried that the dispute harmed them financially. One dealer’s wife was concerned that she would have difficulty putting food on the table if the strike lasted another week. “If it goes on, I’m going to file for food stamps,” she told a reporter. “If our family qualified, why not?”⁴³

The strike was much more burdensome to strikers than to idled dealers or disappointed tourists. Without incomes, they worried about the personal cost of what they were doing. “We can’t afford to strike,” a picketer at the Thunderbird told a reporter when the strike began. “I need to eat and so does my family.” Others made similar statements to the press. “It’s bad,” one of them said of her situation. “I live check to check and have nothing saved.” Walking the picket lines, strikers quickly discovered, was tedious and exhausting despite whatever degree of commitment one had to the strike and to the causes behind it. They had to walk in lockstep circles at hotel and parking lot entrances, in front of automobiles whose drivers were impatient and annoyed at the delays they experienced, if not opposed to the strike altogether. “It ain’t fun,” one picketer said of the experience. “Any knot-head who says we’re singing and having fun is crazy.” Though it was March rather than August, desert wind and scorching sun added to the discomforts of the long hours of midday, as did the chills of the hours of midnight. Southerly winds gusting at twenty-five to thirty miles an hour buffeted strikers almost daily. The winds reached sixty miles an hour on the worst day, when it was almost impossible even to hold onto picket signs much less impress onlookers with one’s commitment to the strike. Indeed, many strikers found the weather the worst part of picketing. “It wouldn’t be too bad if the weather was better,” one of them complained.⁴⁴

Long hours of picketing, however, created new social bonds and friendships, which helped ease the pressures of picketing as well as striking. When shifts ended, picketers often gathered at coffee shops or bars or in their own kitchens to share refreshments and experiences and discuss news and rumors about the strike. Many also met at union headquarters, which became centers of social activity as well as sources of information and assurance. The offices of the musicians’ union, on East Tropicana Boulevard at the south end of the Strip, had long been a place where members rendezvoused and relaxed, and it continued so during the strike. There, musicians “jammed” after picketing, or played dominoes, poker, or other games. Another similar center was the “strike kitchen” in the culinary union parking lot, where volunteers made and served sandwiches, coffee, and other refreshments for picketers.⁴⁵

This culture of solidarity had many components. It included the sense of belonging generated by doing whatever was necessary to help the strike along, including working not only in the strike kitchen but in makeshift child-care facilities, first-aid stations, and information centers. Strikers made their own picket signs, printed and distributed informational leaflets, attended rallies to hear their leaders denounce the “greed” of employers, pledged to “stick together” and to “stay out as long as it takes,” and sang “We Shall Overcome” and “When the Saints Go Marching In.” “Flying squadrons” of picketers rushed to wherever they were needed in whatever emergency situation developed, while picket “captains” dealt with reporters, police officers, and taunting tourists. The strike had its dramatic moments, when, for example, former heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis served coffee to striking workers outside Caesars Palace.⁴⁶

The strike culture fed on its demons. Union leaders boosted morale by denouncing resort owners as coldhearted capitalists out to break the labor movement. They heaped special scorn on Howard Hughes as a deranged billionaire oblivious to the damage he or his minions were doing to the Las Vegas economy and the well-being of workers. “This is a trap by one of the richest men in the world who pictures his Las Vegas hotels as pawns and playthings,” Al Bramlet told striking workers in a typical pep rally speech. “He can afford to do this.” “Howard Hughes and the other big hotel owners are trying to bust the unions here,” Jeff McColl, Bramlet’s assistant, told the press. “All they’re going to do is kill the goose that’s been laying golden eggs for all of us.”⁴⁷

As the strike continued and tempers rose along the picket lines, confrontations between picketers and police officers deployed to keep order inevitably arose. Increasingly, picketers came to view police officers as agents of management and to regard their tactics as “brutal.” Confrontations between strikers and police officers thus became frequent and often violent, which resulted in arrests of picketers.⁴⁸

Worker militancy was evident from the onset and not easily contained. At the three NRA resorts that remained open, picketers taunted and harassed nonunion workers and hotel guests as they entered and left the properties, sometimes threatening them with bodily harm. Security guards at those properties reported that striking workers hit cars with picket signs, and shouted such threats as “We know where you live,” “I’ve got a gun,” and “We’re going to get you!” They also reportedly made “threatening gestures,” as if to assault people crossing their picket lines. Reports of intimidation brought increased police surveillance, which fed the flames of protest. Picketers shouted profanities at police officers and refused their orders to back away from hotel entrances. In one notable incident, a female protestor “slugged” an officer, “breaking his glasses and cutting his face.” That prompted police to arrest a handful of people at the site of the incident. The arrests restored order, but not for long. During the strike, police officers returned repeatedly to Circus Circus, one of the still-open resorts. Once, when they arrived with shotguns and guard dogs, someone threw a “Molotov Cocktail” at them. Though the “cocktail” exploded harmlessly on the ground, it prompted officers to form skirmish lines and push picketers from hotel entrances.⁴⁹

Other resorts experienced similar disturbances. At Caesars Palace, picketers blocked cars from parking lots, backing up traffic along the Strip and damaging several automobiles. One hotel guest later testified that, as she and a female companion drove onto the property, picketers kicked her car, beat it with signs, and climbed on top of it, while repeatedly threatening the women. “Pickets called us, among other things a ‘rich bitch,’ ‘motherfucker,’ and ‘cunt,’” while “two pickets, one male and one female, jumped onto the hood of [our] car,” scratching it in several places. “One scratch was approximately three feet in length, and one about two feet in length.”⁵⁰ The offending picketers had ignored the orders of hotel security guards during this incident, and ceased their intimidation only when the police arrived. When the police left, they resumed the intimidation, and the hotel called them back.⁵¹

There were bomb threats too. On the day the Culinary struck, callers impersonating police officers warned Caesars Palace of an impending explosion. “If you don’t close your hotel tonight,” one caller warned, “there will be a bomb.” A few minutes later, another warned, “You have one hour to close the building or it will be bombed.” Someone posing as a hotel security guard also called the police urging that Caesars Palace be evacuated immediately because of a bomb on its premises. Other resorts received similar threats. “You have thirteen minutes to honor the picket [line] or a bomb is going off,” the Las Vegas Hilton was warned by telephone. “The showroom is going in fifteen minutes,” the same voice telephoned a few minutes later. Searchers found no bombs at either of the resorts, both of which remained open, with no doubt a rattled management and guests.⁵²

This chaos combined with the fall off in tourism to pressure management at least to settle the strike. At the request of Governor Mike O’Callaghan, both sides held separate meetings with the state labor commissioner, Stanley P. Jones, on March 18, before beginning marathon bargaining sessions. By then, the unions had made a counterproposal on the thorny problem of outsourcing, agreeing that employers could subcontract jobs customarily performed by union workers provided that the unions had veto power over any or all of the subcontracting; that subcontractors abide by terms of the unions’ agreements governing wages, hours, and other conditions of employment; and that any dispute arising over the issue be resolved by arbitration. The NRA viewed this counterproposal as irrational. The philosophy behind subcontracting was to lower labor costs and reduce problems associated with collective bargaining. The unions’ offer did nothing to cut costs and only complicated the bargaining process, and thus management rejected it.⁵³

On the no-strike–lockout issue, management now proposed that new contract language prohibit union employees from honoring picket lines of any union other than their own until picketing had continued for sixty days. Because the practical effect of such language would be to ban sympathy strikes, the unions saw it as evidence of “bad faith bargaining.” Labor Commissioner Jones considered the no-strike issue so volatile that he suggested outside arbitrators should be called in to resolve it by binding arbitration.⁵⁴

Governor O’Callaghan endorsed that suggestion, but management quickly rejected it. “We refuse to think that we and the Unions are so lacking in ability or so callous to the needs of our employees and their members that we cannot bridge these gaps and end the strikes,” NRA president Scott wrote O’Callaghan. “We must, therefore, respectfully decline to participate in any third party determination of the remaining issues.” Scott reminded the governor that management’s primary responsibility was to its stockholders, not its employees. “There is simply no way the hotels can abdicate their responsibility to manage. We are responsible to our shareholders for increases in our labor costs.”⁵⁵

Though union leaders never opposed arbitration as a means of settling on the no-strike issue, they worried that a neutral third party might split the difference between the bargaining positions and decide, say, on a thirty-day no-strike–lockout clause. The unions now hoped the governor himself would intervene in the strike, and help resolve such thorny issues to labor’s advantage. O’Callaghan was a popular Democrat elected in 1970 and again in 1974. Having worked for the Lyndon Johnson administration in the Job Corps and in the Office of Emergency Preparedness, he was a strong supporter of the civil rights movement and organized labor, which had endorsed O’Callaghan during his gubernatorial campaigns.⁵⁶

The governor did in fact work to resolve the strike. After management rejected the state’s proposal to arbitrate the length of time union members could not cross picket lines, at O’Callaghan’s request the parties met with the labor commissioner in long daily sessions at the MGM Grand Hotel. Between March 19 and 22, Commissioner Jones persuaded each side to withdraw some of its lesser demands in favor of existing contract language. He developed the framework for a four-year contract that increased cost items to management by about 35 percent. To resolve the controversy over hiring procedures, he got the parties to agree that unions, if requested, could refer applicants to hotels for positions that were not yet open. The hotels would then interview the applicants and hire the person or persons they preferred by name when vacancies occurred. This would enable employers to build labor reservoirs from which to hire as needed and ensure unions that only union members were hired.⁵⁷

Neither side, however, would compromise on the lockout and subcontracting issues. “Our feet are in cement on Articles 23 and 30,” MGM chief Fred Benninger said in reference to these issues on March 21, “even if the union says it will take less money.”⁵⁸ The labor commissioner, disappointed, implored both the employers and unions to be more flexible. Reminding the parties that the resort industry was the “economic lifeblood” of the state, he urged them to “go the extra mile” to resolve the conflict. What if the unions, the commissioner asked, allowed employers to subcontract a few specific forms of kitchen work and the two sides submitted the no-strike–lockout language to arbitration? Would the parties agree? “Absolutely not,” Benninger replied. “We are not going to move on those two areas.” The mediation talks had reached an impasse.⁵⁹

Meanwhile, the Silver Slipper, one of the Summa properties, reopened on a limited basis. Unlike other struck properties, the Silver Slipper had no hotel accommodations, swimming pool, or shopping arcade. Essentially a casino and bar with two small showrooms for entertainment and a coffee shop, it thus employed far fewer union employees than most struck properties. It reopened by simply recalling its dealers and other nonunion personnel, with low-level managers tending bar and additional security workers protecting employees who crossed picket lines. As this transpired, picketers no doubt wondered whether other Summa properties would follow the Silver Slipper’s lead and reopen their casinos and bars, thereby weakening the strike. Asked about that possibility, Clark Eaton, manager of the Silver Slipper, said only that his own gaming tables and bar would remain open around the clock with or without union employees.⁶⁰ Perry Lieber, public relations manager for Summa, said only that the corporation had no “immediate plans” to reopen other properties but that that might change. Howard Hughes, Lieber added, had not made the decision to reopen the Silver Slipper. “It was made by his lieutenants.”⁶¹

As the position of the two sides hardened, union militancy augmented. Conflicts between picketers and police had declined after March 17, when a federal court issued a temporary restraining order limiting picketing on the Strip. The order, which the NRA had asked for, prevented strikers from blocking entrances to resorts by limiting to two the number of pickets at resort entrances. It also required picketers to stay at least fifteen feet from resort property and prohibited picketers from intimidating or threatening anyone “in any manner.”⁶² The order had a calming effect, though picketers were still visible and noisy, especially at the three NRA resorts that remained open.⁶³

A few days later, several hundred striking workers gathered outside Caesars Palace and marched toward the hotel “shaking their fists and shouting, ‘We want to eat,’ and ‘No lock-out!’” They blocked hotel entrances and stopped traffic, while state and local police rushed to the scene. The law enforcement officials closed a half-mile stretch of the Strip to relieve traffic congestion and ordered protestors away from hotel entrances and off the street. When protestors refused to obey, officers began arresting them. In most cases, those arrested went quietly, singing “We Shall Overcome” or “Smile on Your Brother.” Some, however, had to be wrestled to the ground, handcuffed, and dragged away. Within an hour, the police made more than fifty arrests.⁶⁴

They made a score of additional arrests when several hundred protestors blocked entrances to the Dunes. As this occurred, protestors threw beer bottles, rocks, and even a board at police, while others ran along the Strip taunting them. Protestors then formed “human stop signs” in front of police cars, and kicked the cars as they inched their way through the crowd. A female protestor yelled, “We took the Strip yesterday! We’re going to take it again today!” The press charged that strike leaders had orchestrated this civil disobedience, but union spokesmen denied the charge. “Each of those people has a mind of his own,” Jeff McColl of the Culinary told reporters.⁶⁵

As the mayhem mounted, both sides tried to influence public opinion through the press. In “notices” to the public in Las Vegas newspapers, both appealed to the reason and the emotions of readers. Both linked their cause to cherished American values and freedoms. An “open letter” from the management of Caesars Palace to its striking employees, which appeared in the Sun on March 21, characterized the resort’s contract proposals as a “square shake” and suggested its effort to limit sympathy strikes would increase the job security of its employees. “Why should our employees be out of work any time some other union strikes?” the letter asked. The question appealed to workers as individuals while discounting the logic and value of collective action. The letter also portrayed employers as guardians of the public interest. “Let’s keep Las Vegas growing,” it read. “We have fine schools, hospitals, and wonderful recreational centers. We don’t have to take a back seat to any other city.” The unions’ demands, this implied, threatened those things.⁶⁶

By now, the newspapers were blaming labor leaders, especially Bramlet, for prolonging the strike. Headlines and editorials described him as vainglorious and power hungry and the striking workers as his robotic pawns. “He thrives on power,” the Valley Times said of Bramlet, “and the immense power he has had apparently isn’t enough.”⁶⁷ The Review-Journal suggested on March 25 that most striking workers no longer supported the strike but were afraid to tell Bramlet so. “Strikers Scared to Voice Opinions with Officials of Culinary Union,” the paper headlined.⁶⁸ The story under this headline suggested that picketers were picketing over issues that mattered only to Bramlet, who would end the conflict whenever his whim told him to do so. The fact that newspapers had lost advertising revenue as a result of the strike may explain some of this criticism. In normal times, the resorts were among the papers’ largest advertisers.⁶⁹

As the strike entered its third week, Edward T. Hanley, president of the national Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE), entered the fray. Hanley (no kin to the Tom Hanley discussed earlier in this study) was a young, ambitious, and increasingly powerful national labor leader. His arrival in Las Vegas raised hopes of a quick strike settlement because he had earlier been instrumental in resolving several bitter labor disputes. Like Bramlet, he was “street-smart,” having grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago, where he tended bar in his father’s tavern before he became active in union affairs. He served in the Air Force during the Korean War and then returned to Chicago, where he rose to the top of the local Bartender and Beverage Dispensers Union. In 1962 he became president of the executive board that negotiated labor agreements for culinary and bartending workers in Chicago, a position he held until he became president of HERE in 1973. The U.S. Justice Department suspected that Hanley climbed union ladders with help from Chicago crime figures, but he was never convicted of any wrongdoing.⁷⁰

On March 22, at the MGM Grand, Hanley, on behalf of the striking unions, met with NRA members Frank Scott, Fred Benninger, and Al Benedict as well as their legal counsel Walter Loomis, who advised the NRA on labor contracts.⁷¹ Though the local union leaders denied it, their absence at this pivotal meeting was a sign of an internal dispute within the Culinary. Unlike Bramlet, Hanley and other national officers of the Culinary and Bartenders were prepared to compromise on noncost issues in return for pay and benefit increases they could sell to striking workers. “He wanted to stop the strike,” Lewin later said of Hanley. “So he called a meeting for the executive board of the resort association.”⁷² Evidently, Hanley had recently berated Bramlet in the presence of local union leaders for letting the strike drag on. “[He] blew his stack because the negotiations were going nowhere,” one of Bramlet’s aides said of Hanley’s handling of the strike. “[He] was saying things like ‘Al, end this goddamn thing.’”⁷³

Whether or not this account is the whole truth of the Hanley-Bramlet encounter—and it has the ring of truth to it—local journalists interpreted Hanley’s presence in Las Vegas as an effort to enhance his own position as a labor leader at Bramlet’s expense. Hanley had national political aspirations, the journalists suggested, and saw the Las Vegas strike as a chance to cast himself as a powerful, moderating voice in the national labor movement.

Whatever the veracity of these speculations, Hanley’s involvement in the strike was part of a larger bargaining strategy. Local unions wanted and needed help from their parent organization, especially during costly, difficult strikes. National officers brought calming voices to bargaining sessions in such strikes precisely because they were distant from the emotions and militancy of strikers and the personal investments or territoriality of local union leaders in the strike. They also brought a sense of power to such sessions, for it was they who approved or rejected agreements made by locals of the unions they controlled. Men like Hanley could and did make concessions to employers that local negotiators could never make and, in so doing, they could deflect or defy the insistence of local negotiators on sensitive issues. In this case, however, the division between national and local leaders was much less than press accounts suggested. Hanley could influence but not control the Las Vegas Culinary. “The membership is so dynamic,” as Henri Lewin recognized at the time. “Hanley cannot come and promise you anything.”⁷⁴

On March 22 management offered new proposals on both cost and noncost issues. Hanley demurred, insisting that he had to talk the proposals over with Bramlet but intimated that the Culinary was prepared to compromise. He also indicated the union would sign a four-year contract with employers, something it had never done. More important, he suggested that the union would accept contract provisions prohibiting its members from supporting dealers’ organizing efforts and honoring picket lines of other unions for ten days. He also suggested that management might outsource a limited number of jobs now held by union employees. These issues, he said, could be clarified in a codicil, or “side letter” to the contract.⁷⁵

Two days later, after both parties caucused, Governor O’Callaghan presided over a negotiating session attended only by the chief labor and management figures, among them Barron Hilton, Kirk Kerkorian, and Edward T. Hanley. O’Callaghan insisted at once that the parties end their conflict then and there and offered proposals to help them do so.⁷⁶ He supported management’s call for a strong no-strike guarantee and labor’s need for significant pay and benefit increases. According to the state labor commissioner, who also attended the session, O’Callaghan alternately cajoled and bullied the parties into resolving their differences. “Governor O’Callaghan was tough when toughness was required,” the commissioner later wrote. “He exhibited integrity, common sense, and [a] keen sense of humor and courage.” Without the governor’s “expert leadership,” the commissioner believed, “the gaming industry and the labor movement in Nevada could have destroyed themselves.”⁷⁷

The commissioner no doubt exaggerated the governor’s role, but by the time the meeting ended, the parties had reached a compromise agreement. The agreement included wage and benefit increases of 35 percent over four years, a clear victory for workers on cost items.⁷⁸ In exchange, the unions agreed to restrictions on the right to honor picket lines, specifically prohibiting their members from honoring lines of other groups for ten days and obligating them to cross lines set up for organizational or informational purposes. In addition, they agreed that the resorts could purchase a variety of prepared foods from outside sources, from pre-mixed salads to peeled vegetables, which promised to eliminate certain union jobs in the kitchen.⁷⁹

Settlement with the Musicians and Stagehands soon followed. The NRA had already agreed to a financial package with these unions resembling that of the Culinary and Bartenders. The agreement with the Musicians, however, covered only instrumentalists in showrooms. Arbitrators would decide the status of lounge musicians and settle disagreements over “mechanical music.”⁸⁰ (In the first instance, the arbitrators sided with the union, ruling that hotels had to negotiate the terms and conditions of employment in lounges with unions, not bandleaders.⁸¹ In the second, they ruled that hotels could record the performances of house orchestras and use the recordings during “brush up” and “replacement” rehearsals but had to pay musicians “double scale” during recording sessions.)⁸² Like the vast majority of culinary workers and bartenders, musicians and stagehands promptly ratified the agreements. The strike was over.⁸³

On March 27, seventeen days after the strike began, the NRA resorts reopened. Workers returned to their jobs; marquees along the Strip flashed the good news. In spaces normally reserved for the names of stellar performers, resorts proclaimed “Welcome, We’re Open.” Musicians and stagehands returned the next day. Lounge shows reopened immediately; main showrooms followed suit in a few days. Tourists trickled back more slowly. The casinos were “nearly empty” the first weekend, the press reported. “It’s really dead in here,” a tourist told a reporter at the Frontier. “I guess I ought to come back later. Maybe my luck would change.” In fact, some returning tourists were lucky. As soon as the MGM Grand reopened, a visitor from California won $2,300 on a nickel slot machine.⁸⁴

As the Las Vegas resort industry recovered, the strike’s meaning became clear. According to the Convention and Visitors Authority, the strike cost the city about thirty conventions, more than 225,000 tourists, and financial losses of $20 million to $26 million. If, as an old adage had it, money coming into resorts turned over five times in the city, the cost to the community was perhaps $100 to $130 million. The NRA estimated that the strike cost $131 million in “tourist and related revenue.”⁸⁵ Whatever the exact figures, everyone lost significantly. No conflict in the industry had ever been so costly or shown so clearly how dependent the local economy was on tourism.

Ironically, the aftermath also demonstrated the strength and resilience of that economy. During the first quarter of 1976, the total number of hotel rooms occupied in Clark County, which reflected visitor volume in the area, increased about 12 percent from the previous year. Though a dozen major resorts had closed for two and a half weeks, nearly 800,000 people visited Las Vegas in March, almost as many as had visited the city in March 1975. Despite the cancellation of conventions, there were more than thirty thousand conventioneers in Las Vegas during the month of the strike, many of them during the strike itself. In other words, the Las Vegas economy held up surprisingly well, and the city’s drawing power seemed greater than ever after the conflict ended.⁸⁶

The implications of the strike for labor-management relations in Las Vegas were less clear immediately. The strike was largely the result of a struggle between the Culinary and the Summa Corporation, whose executives played a key role in challenging traditional bargaining practices in the Las Vegas resort industry. “What it boiled down to,” as one of those executives said later of the strike, “was a power play between Bramlet and us. We wouldn’t cave in to his bullying like some of the other owners.”⁸⁷ But other properties had also followed the hard line against the unions. This unity suggested that patterns of collective bargaining that had generally benefited labor in the past were just that—a thing of the past.