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

• Afterword
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 200-207
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Afterword

Strikers walking picket lines in the 1984–85 strike often waxed nostalgically about their work and circumstances in earlier times. “I liked it better in the old days, before Howard Hughes and the other corporations came in,” one of them said. “This used to be a fun town,” another complained, “but the fun is gone. So is the family atmosphere.”¹ Union leaders agreed. “This used to be a proud industry,” Jeff McColl later reminisced of the times before 1985, “and that’s all gone.”² Mark Massagli, whose musicians were the strike’s biggest losers, thought large corporations had drained the “warmth” out of Las Vegas. He described their managers as “cold granite,” “masters,” and “machines.”³ Such words reflected more than the usual separation and discord of labor-management relations. They suggested that management had effectively contained the role of organized labor and tilted the balance of power to its advantage.

The steady expansion and labor-intensive nature of the resort industry helped workers and their unions escape the fate of many of their counterparts in manufacturing and extractive industries. Employers in declining industries like steel and machine-tools could point to their shrinking share of domestic and world markets to justify assaults on trade union power. They could also threaten to shift production to low-wage areas overseas if unions resisted their contract demands. Belligerence toward labor was harder to explain in booming enterprises like the Las Vegas resorts. In the period here reviewed, employers could not easily export, subcontract, or mechanize resort jobs. Not until the recession of the early 1980s, when the tourist count in the area dipped for the first time, did belt-tightening policies look necessary to anyone but resort managers.⁴

Although management gained major concessions from Las Vegas unions in the 1984–85 strike, its efforts to smash the unions were generally unsuccessful. Trade unions were too entrenched to be eliminated. Corporate leaders understood this, even those among them who were viscerally opposed to unions. In the strike’s aftermath, most sought labor peace within the latitudinarian limits they had imposed on the unions.⁵ As a result, Las Vegas resort workers continued to earn decent wages and enjoy job security, which were their most immediate concerns. The events recounted in these final pages offer an opportunity to reflect more fully on general patterns in the resort industry and its workforce in the years after 1985. Las Vegas, it needs to be emphasized, remains a city in the making, and organized labor’s future there is unclear.

Through the late twentieth century, Las Vegas continued to be the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan area. Between 1985 and 2000, its population more than doubled, to 1.3 million people. The growth rate was not just rapid but dizzying and disorienting. It strained all facets of community life and sustained an unprecedented construction boom. New homes went up “as fast as stucco could dry,” a journalist noted, yet people still scrambled to buy them.⁶ The growth overwhelmed public agencies and institutions and was no doubt all the more impressive to the people who had long lived and worked in the city.⁷

Newcomers to Las Vegas in those years generally resembled their predecessors. Most were working-class Americans who came to Las Vegas to work in a place of opportunity, perhaps mobility, and hopefully economic and social security. More than a third arrived from California, another third from elsewhere in the Southwest, including Texas. More surprising, about a quarter of them had migrated from east of the Mississippi River. Although retirees made up 10 percent of the new population, they were greatly outnumbered by the largest demographic group, those between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. Most of these had no children, were relatively uneducated, and had limited skills.⁸ Latinos composed the largest ethnic minority among the new arrivals and constituted the fastest-growing ethnic group in the metropolitan area. People with Spanish surnames represented less than 10 percent of the Clark County population in 1985 but nearly 15 percent in 2000. Perhaps more unexpectedly, the percentage of Asians and Pacific Islanders jumped too, to more than 5 percent of the population.⁹

Asked why they moved to Las Vegas, newcomers often spoke of the climate, and the low cost of housing, taxes, and living, but the city’s growing economy and its abundance of low-and semiskilled jobs were the principal magnet. While industrial employment and economic development stalled in many parts of the country, the Las Vegas economy not only grew rapidly but also diversified in fields from financial services and manufacturing to warehousing and distribution services, as well as tourism and the proliferating economic enterprises related to it. As always, gaming and tourism remained the primary engine of growth. The annual visitor count in Clark County nearly doubled in the 1990s, to thirty-two million people. By the beginning of the new millennium, tourists were pumping more than $30 billion a year into the local economy, more than four times the total for 1985.¹⁰

Such figures reflected the most spectacular wave of resort construction in the history of Las Vegas. A dozen major resorts sprang up along the Strip in the late 1980s and 1990s, most of them financed by corporations already heavily invested in the area. The Mirage, Treasure Island, Excalibur, the Luxor, and a new MGM Grand opened between 1989 and 1994. The Stratosphere Tower, the Monte Carlo, and New York–New York opened in the mid-1990s. The Bellagio, the Mandalay Bay, the Paris, and the Venetian soon followed. These new “mega-resorts” had larger casinos and more hotel rooms than their predecessors did and many more nongaming amenities, which enhanced the Las Vegas experience, whatever one’s interests and expectations.

The new MGM Grand and the Bellagio illustrated these points. The former, which radiated a Hollywood theme, had four gaming areas, more than 3,500 slot machines, and 170 gaming tables. It also had two large showrooms, twenty restaurants and eating places, a thirty-three-acre theme park, and a 15,200 seat special events center. The Bellagio was even more impressive. The eleven-acre replica of Lombardy’s Lake Como that fronted the resort had within it 1,300 lights that illuminated fountains that burst forth every fifteen minutes and “danced” to recorded music piped into a surrounding high-tech sound system. Inside the resort were more than $300 million worth of art treasures, as well as Italian marble floors, lush gardens, and a walkway of shops resembling New York’s Fifth Avenue.¹¹

Other spectacular changes altered the visible landscape. Several older Strip properties, including the Flamingo Hilton, the Frontier, the Riviera, the Sahara, and the Stardust, built new hotel towers. City officials and developers turned Fremont Street into a pedestrian mall covered by a ninety-foot high canopy that stretched from Main Street to Las Vegas Boulevard. The canopy contained two million colored lights, and functioned as a backdrop for nightly light-and-sound shows. Developers also built several new “neighborhood” resorts in these years. The Gold Coast and the Palms opened a mile west of the Strip, and the Fiesta, the Santa Fe, and the Texas further north. Like large Strip resorts, these properties had impressive themed architecture and interiors designed to appeal to customers’ dreams and imaginations. They, too, added to the idea of Las Vegas as the “stuff of fantasy.”¹²

Behind the fantasy and hidden from tourists, however, were continuing signs of the ongoing struggle between workers and employers. Organizers still tried to unionize dealers; arbitrators still heard testimony about “willful misconduct” and “insubordination” on the part of employees; and aggrieved workers as well as civil rights advocates still fought discriminatory employment practices. The range of these activities showed that many resort managers continued the confrontational tactics that had won them concessions from unions and workers in the 1970s and 1980s. These tactics connected the story of workers in Las Vegas resorts to the parallel decay of organized labor nationwide except in the public-sector unions. It also showed that workers in all sectors of the economy except government faced problems unprecedented since the 1930s.¹³

There were three major work stoppages in the resort industry after 1985. The first signaled the dismal end of an era for musicians. In 1989, when the musicians’ union contract with major resorts expired, the Tropicana, the Hilton properties, and other Strip properties took this occasion to demand the right to use taped music and keyboard-operated synthesizers in place of showroom orchestras in order to lower labor costs. The union resisted and struck the properties to protect showroom jobs. The strike, which lasted for eight months, won little support from the Culinary and other unions, and the musicians lost utterly. The once proud orchestra musicians all but vanished, and other equally skilled musicians left the city or sought other work. The mechanization of showroom music was a near fatal blow to the union. Between 1989 and 1995, its membership fell from fourteen hundred to fewer than nine hundred members. Four years later, the union still had contracts with nine Strip resorts, but only a few musicians worked in those properties.¹⁴

The other strikes pitted unions against family-owned resorts, which had continued to lose economic ground to corporate properties. In 1989 the Culinary and other unions struck the Horseshoe after its owner, Jack Binion, who recently had inherited the property from his father, refused to accept the same provisions of the labor agreements that Strip properties had signed. In his rejection, Binion pointed to the difficulties his small property had competing against nearby operations that had decertified their unions in the mid-1980s as well as increasingly large Strip resorts. Developments in the resort industry, in other words, threatened to overwhelm places like his. Labor leaders dismissed this rationale, arguing that the Horseshoe was one of the city’s most profitable businesses. Striking workers maintained picket lines outside the property for nine months, until Binion finally agreed to a four-year contract that hiked wages and benefits in return for work-rule changes that enhanced his control over hiring and firing.¹⁵

The third strike began in 1991, after the Frontier’s new owners unilaterally slashed wages, imposed new work rules, and reduced benefits over the protests of their unionized employees. The owners, Margaret Elardi and her two sons, were resolutely antiunion. They refused to bargain with union leaders, ignored state efforts to mediate the dispute, and even defied NLRB rulings. Despite those efforts, the Elardis were unable to break the unions. In a remarkable demonstration of solidarity, the Culinary and three other unions kept picketers outside the Frontier for nearly seven years, until the Elardis sold the property and the new owner reached an agreement with the striking unions. No union worker crossed the picket line during this protracted strike.¹⁶

These conflicts exemplified the patterns of collective bargaining after 1985. The Nevada Resort Association withdrew from labor negotiations and reverted to its original role of lobbying and public relations for the industry. Resorts resumed bargaining in small, loosely knit groups that reflected the size, circumstances, and purposes of their members. Large corporate resorts like Caesars Palace and the Hilton properties aligned themselves in one cluster. Smaller corporate-owned resorts like the Stardust and the Sahara formed another bargaining group, as did still-smaller downtown properties such as the Fremont, El Cortez, and the Horseshoe. Yet other resorts, including some large properties on the Strip, insisted on negotiating individually with the unions. Typically, and generally successfully, these properties demanded wage and benefit packages that cost them less than those agreed to by large industry leaders. This complicated the bargaining process.¹⁷

Under these arrangements, collective bargaining became less volatile, essentially because the labor market in Las Vegas tightened. The new resorts that opened on the Strip in the late 1980s and early 1990s employed more than twenty-five thousand workers, largely depleting the pool of available employees. The new MGM Grand alone employed seventy-five hundred, more than six times as many people as resorts like the Desert Inn and the Sahara had on staff in the early 1970s. The resulting labor shortage became acute when the Bellagio began recruiting its workforce of more than eight thousand. By the time the Mandalay Bay, the Venetian, and the Paris opened, personnel officers were desperate for workers in all categories. “The number of talented employees out there looking for work is very dry,” one resort manager said in 1998. “There’s good people but they’re far and few between.”¹⁸ To build workforces, resorts sent job recruiters throughout the area. Others “raided” competitors’ workforces, which sometimes resulted in workplace confrontations. “We’ve been thrown out of some of the best places in town,” one “raider” admitted.¹⁹

The tightening labor market helped the Culinary organize most of the new resorts while boosting its members’ wages. From 1988 to 1998, as trade union membership in the private sector declined across the nation, membership in the Culinary more than doubled to forty thousand, and in 2008 topped sixty thousand. The wages of the union’s members might have risen as fast or faster in these years than those of any private-sector union in the nation. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, many culinary workers in Las Vegas earned more than twice the wages of their counterparts in other tourist destinations. The base wage of union waiters, for example, topped $10 an hour in 2004, nearly three times that of average waiters in New York.²⁰

There was nothing automatic about the Culinary’s success. It came as a result of effective leadership and strategizing. In the aftermath of the 1984–85 strike, Culinary leaders came to realize that their approach to collective bargaining had been more or less ad hoc; that is, they had dealt with industrial developments not by intense calculation, planning, and organizing but simply as they came up. They had made no detailed studies of their own situation or that of their industry, gathered no systematic data on industry profits and income, and developed no long-term strategies for each and every level of their organization. In other words, it was not only the professionalization, organization, and rationalization that management went through that accounted for Culinary losses in the 1984–85 strike but also the absence of a similar transformation on the part of the union. Under the leadership of Jim Arnold, who replaced Jeff McColl as secretary-treasurer in 1987, the Culinary brought in seasoned organizers and professional researchers to deal with the increasingly complex businesses that had replaced the simpler enterprises of earlier times.²¹

In traditional trade-union terms, the Culinary’s success after 1985 carried a high price. Beginning with the staffing of the workforce at the Mirage in 1988, the union asked for recognition as bargaining agent for the resort’s culinary workers as soon as 51 percent of the workers hired for Culinary jobs signed cards asking to join the union. This innovative “card check” strategy, which Canadian unions had pioneered, allowed unions to circumvent the costly and lengthy process of holding representation elections, which the union believed functioned in management’s favor. As badly as the Mirage and other employers needed workers by the late 1980s, they agreed to the card-check system only in return for the right to reclassify and lay-off employees as workplace demands dictated. Some of them also demanded and got contract language prohibiting their employees from engaging in sympathy strikes “or any other form of economic action” for the duration of their labor contracts.²²

This concession largely ended the struggle over workers’ right to honor picket lines other than their own and eclipsed the power of small unions. Once resorts like the Mirage, the Monte Carlo, the Stratosphere, and Treasure Island reached agreements with the Culinary prohibiting sympathy strikes, they often refused to negotiate with other unions. By the late 1990s, when more than forty resorts in the area had contracts with the Culinary, fewer than thirty had contracts with the Operating Engineers and only twenty with the Teamsters.²³ The inability of those unions to organize new resorts because of the Culinary’s organizing tactics drove a new wedge between the unions. In 1994 John Wilhelm of the International Culinary (and a future president of the national AFL-CIO) acknowledged this division and called for new “joint organizing strategies” to eliminate it. He and other national labor leaders, Wilhelm told the Operating Engineers that year, intended to “restore the solidarity which had once existed among the casino unions in Las Vegas.” “Each union will get its traditional casino jurisdiction when we are successful.”²⁴

The Culinary orchestrated public protests to pressure some of the new resorts to recognize the union as the bargaining agent for its workers. Thus, on May 26, 1993, the union put five thousand picketers outside the new MGM Grand, whose corporate executives refused to bargain. For three hours, the protesters waved American flags, chanted union slogans, and blasted Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” through loudspeakers. The police arrested more than five hundred of the protestors, the largest mass arrest in Nevada history.²⁵ Four years later, on July 29, 1997, the union put twice that many picketers outside New York–New York to protest that resort’s subcontracting of its restaurants to nonunion firms. The latter demonstration coincided with a meeting of the national conference of governors at the nearby Mirage, and visiting journalists witnessed and reported the event across the national media.²⁶ Such tactics were not always successful, but they no doubt encouraged employers to acknowledge the union’s power.

Las Vegas today remains a place where wage earners partake of the American dream. Trade unions in the area still win contracts providing decent wages and benefits, and job security. This does not make the city a workers’ paradise, as one journalist has recently suggested.²⁷ Resort workers are not immune to forces of automation, global competition, or economic recession, or to the effects of terrorism or oil shortages that limit the free movement of people and goods and services to an isolated desert metropolis. Their unions hold their own rather than march triumphantly over rich and powerful employers. In other words, labor relations in Las Vegas today are contentious without being oppressive, relatively peaceful without much harmony. The differing realities of the social being of laborers and capitalists still govern their functioning. The result is very far from the overwhelming degradation of workers that Marx foresaw as the inevitable outcome of capitalism. But it is also somewhat removed from the efficiencies implied in Adam Smith’s account of the workings of capitalism’s “invisible hand.”