2. Working in Las Vegas

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

No 2
Working in Las Vegas

It is tempting to view service workers as unskilled, often transient laborers, who have little or no influence over their work experiences and even less impact on larger economic matters. While much of the work in Las Vegas resorts did in fact involve tedious, repetitive tasks for low wages by low-skilled employees, the overall picture of work in resorts was much more varied and interesting than that scenario allows. A great deal of it was in fact challenging, skilled, and remunerative. Even the jobs of many resort workers who performed “menial” tasks were vital to the success of the resort industry. In addition, many of these workers performed tasks that required training, dexterity, and experience. The evidence is convincing that people in both of these categories saw their jobs in terms more positive than negative given the circumstances of their lives. Many showed commitment to and interest in their work. More than a few, including workers at the bottom of the job hierarchy, considered themselves participants in a larger-than-life enterprise capped at the top by the dazzling wealth, glamour, and extravagance of Las Vegas tourism and entertainment.

This is an episode, an experience, difficult to locate in the conventionalities of American labor history. Resort workers in Las Vegas were largely service workers, but they were certainly not apathetic about matters relating to their wages, workplace circumstance, or social being; nor were they passive players in the history of their industry. Most of them belonged to relatively strong trade unions that won them meaningful pay raises and increasing job security through the period of this study. Generally the unions were democratic and pragmatic, and some of their leaders had influence in state and local politics. The unions also had considerable control over the local labor force. Although they were autonomous organizations at the local level, they had of necessity to work with each other as well as their own national organizations. Their success depended on their ability to confront realistically the economic and institutional challenges they faced.

Through the postwar years, Las Vegas hotels and casinos employed more than a quarter of the local workforce. In 1955, for example, about 8,000 of the area’s 30,000 wage earners worked in hotels and casinos, and some 6,000 of those in the ten largest resorts on the Strip.¹ Twenty years later, hotels and casinos employed about 40,000 of the area’s 150,000 wage earners, concentrated in increasingly large resorts. In 1975 the Desert Inn and the Sahara each employed about 1,200 people and Caesars Palace more than 2,000, while the mammoth MGM Grand employed 4,500, more workers than all manufacturing firms in the area combined. By 1973 the annual payrolls of hotels and casinos in and around Las Vegas amounted to more than $300 million.²

With their sizable workforces, the resorts offered guests an astonishing variety of services, from pedicures and rubdowns to banking and security. They housed them, entertained them, wined and dined them, and transported them; and the most lavish of them otherwise sought to satisfy their every need and whim. To illustrate the scale of all this, the Las Vegas Hilton included three towers of hotel rooms, a thirty-thousand-square-foot casino, multiple bars and lounges, a two-thousand-seat showroom, a “legitimate” theater, a dance hall, and an outdoor recreation area with badminton and tennis courts, table tennis, swimming pools, health spa, golf driving range, and an eighteen-hole golf course. It also included six restaurants and a large coffee shop, as well as clothing stores and souvenir shops and other retail outlets.³

There were four general categories of wage employees in resorts, the lines between which were loose and overlapping. The first category consisted of professional and semiprofessional people, who had training and often considerable experience in jobs that demanded administrative or technological knowledge and creativity as well as the ability to work with other people. A few of them, such as executive chefs and orchestra leaders, received individually negotiated salaries and supervised the work of other employees, though in the employment hierarchy they were well below the circle of executives who managed the resorts. A second, larger category included white-collar workers—secretaries, clerks, and switchboard operators, whose jobs required technical training, tact, and judgment and who had varying degrees of autonomy and independence in the execution of their tasks. A third and still-larger category incorporated blue-collar workers, who typically worked outdoors tending gardens, or parking cars, for example, or indoors repairing slot machines, operating surveillance systems, or guarding property.⁴

The fourth and largest category of employees encompassed workers who had direct contact with customers—bartenders and wait people, for example, and casino dealers, luggage handlers, and housekeepers. Though jobs in this category were relatively low skilled and involved little individual innovativeness, even the most menial required some skill and initiative. Workers who dealt directly with customers or guests had to deliver services dependably, correctly, and courteously. Moreover, they had to project an image that reinforced management’s ideas of what attracted customers to Las Vegas. Employees must smile and speak courteously while accommodating customers’ every demand and need.⁵

Resorts had house rules regulating the appearance and demeanor of employees who dealt with customers. The Landmark Hotel, for example, required its security guards to keep their uniforms “clean and neatly pressed,” and their shoes or boots “highly polished.” It permitted them short mustaches but no beards or goatees, and required them to keep their hair “clean and neatly trimmed.” The guards must also “maintain vigilance and alertness at all time,” which meant keeping their hands out of their pockets and minimizing interaction with guests and other employees. Conversations in the workplace must be “impersonal”; and off-the-job guards must maintain a good image: the Landmark, for example, required them to conduct their private affairs “in such a manner as to cause no derogatory reflection on the Landmark’s Hotel or the Security Department.”⁶

The variety of occupations in resorts makes it difficult to speak generally about resort workers, but some conclusions seem evident. In the postwar years, most hotel and casino workers were newcomers to Las Vegas and to the types of work they did. They were also disproportionately young, male, and white, and in all of these characteristics they mirrored patterns in the state’s workforce. According to census reports, a third of Nevada’s population in 1960 had lived outside the state five years earlier, and the state as a whole had proportionately more young and middle-aged adults than the nation as a whole. About a third of recent arrivals came from California and another third from Texas and elsewhere in the Southwest. A quarter or so had lived east of the Mississippi River, and many of the rest were from the Northern Plains. The ratio of men to women in the state’s workforce was about two to one, and most workers held relatively low-skilled and low-paying jobs.⁷ Turnover in the job market was consequently high, especially in the resort industry. In areas of employment like kitchen work and housekeeping, resorts often replaced more than a fifth of their workforce annually. The turnover problem was even greater in the field of security, where some resorts replaced more than a third of their workforce annually. Because this lack of stability in security could compromise services, it was a constant source of concern for management.⁸

Both custom and law segmented the labor market. The best jobs—those involving power, authority, creativity, or high pay—were almost invariably reserved for white men. Public ordinances barred women from working as bartenders and dealers in the city limits, and attitudes and customs discouraged them from applying—or being considered by union stewards—for those and other male-dominated jobs along the Strip. By custom as well as preference, resorts restricted African Americans, who accounted for about 9 percent of Clark Countians in the early 1960s and 15 percent of the city population, to work in areas of housekeeping and cleaning.

These patterns reflected those in the larger society. Businesses in all industries discriminated against women and minorities before the civil rights laws of the 1960s had an effect. Until then, racial segregation was the rule in all aspects of life in Las Vegas. Resorts generally refused to accept black guests, many of them prominently displaying signs with some variation of the words, “No colored trade solicited.” Those that did accept black guests limited their numbers and excluded them from their dining, gambling, and swimming facilities.⁹

The persistence of discrimination reflected the strength of social custom as well as racism in Las Vegas and its resort industry. Racial equality was not part of the image resorts sought to project. If they thought about it at all, it was probably to fear that desegregation would drive away white customers. Owners and managers did not really know the racial views of their customers, but they were no doubt correct in assuming that their views were those conventional among white Americans in the 1950s and early 1960s. Those views, of course, discouraged any thought of racial equality.

Although wageworkers who began at the bottom of the wage scale in Las Vegas resorts rose to the ranks of well-paying positions no more frequently than did their counterparts in other similar industries, they did change jobs and even job classifications often, not least because of the rapid growth of the industry and thus of job openings in it. Bellhops became bell captains; busboys became banquet servers; and blackjack dealers became pit bosses. Similarly, change girls became head clerks, and hairdressers heads of wardrobe departments. Dissatisfied, disgruntled, or venturesome employees seem often to have moved to a newly opened resort down the street or on the Strip. In the unionized workforce, employers hired workers according to collective bargaining agreements, which encouraged continuity and promotions. The agreements required management to hire union workers and give preference to experienced applicants. Promotions kept employees in the same area of employment and involved modest pay hikes. In 1970 employees in housekeeping departments in the resorts earned $15 to $22 a day regardless of their responsibilities, and those in dining room services $15 to $25.¹⁰

Because many early Las Vegas entrepreneurs were Italian Americans or Jewish Americans, it might have been the case that men of Italian and Jewish ancestry had better chances of moving up the occupational ladder from the 1930s to the 1950s than did those of other ethnicities. Men in these groups were probably disproportionately involved in illegal gambling in the East, and their skills and personal connections helped at least some of them secure employment and investment opportunities in those years in Las Vegas. Once that occurred, they turned to experienced and trusted friends to help build their enterprises. It was thus no coincidence that a disproportionate share of casino bosses, showroom captains, maitre d’s, and other midlevel managers, as well as dealers, had Italian or Jewish surnames before and after 1950. So, too, did many entertainers. Italian American singers and entertainers were popular across the country in those years, but the prevalence of their names on marquees along the Strip suggests a certain degree of ethnic favoring. Like the padrones who employed Italian migrant laborers in turn-of-the-century Chicago and New York, the men who pioneered gambling in Las Vegas privileged their own ethnic groups.¹¹

The service-oriented nature of resort work safeguarded employees from some of the dislocations workers in manufacturing began facing in the 1960s and 1970s, when new technologies simplified or eliminated jobs, or when the onset of globalization began “outsourcing” manufacturing jobs overseas. Even musicians, whose jobs across the country had been rendered superfluous in theaters and other venues by the introduction of new recording technologies, continued to have steady work in Las Vegas. Yet work patterns in resorts were never static, and technological changes there did indeed simplify many jobs and thus reduce skill levels. New automated beverage dispensers that released premeasured amounts of liquor, for example, simplified the tasks of bartenders, just as dishwashing machines, microwave ovens, and prepackaged meals affected the skill levels necessary for kitchen work.

Recollections of employees reveal some of the variety in these patterns. They also indicate something of the nature and structure of the workforce and of workers’ attitudes toward their jobs. Many of the reminiscing workers were newcomers who sought work in Las Vegas in the postwar years, and perhaps excitement too. This was especially true of workers in the field of entertainment.

The memories of Mark Massagli, who was for years a lounge musician in Las Vegas before becoming a union leader in the mid-1960s, illustrate this pattern. Massagli grew up in Southern California, where he learned to play the upright bass. In 1957, when he was twenty-one, he moved to Las Vegas as a member of the Hank Penny Band. The city made an immediate, positive impression on him. “Boy, I thought, what a wonderful place,” he recalled, “a musician working in Las Vegas, all this glamour and glitter and music everywhere.”¹² After a while, Massagli left the Penny band to work for the Sawyer Sisters, who performed at major properties along the Strip. Job opportunities for musicians, Massagli recalled, were plentiful. In addition to orchestra musicians who accompanied headline acts in principal showrooms, or supported stars or acts in production shows, hundreds of musicians like Massagli worked in casino or hotel lounges. “There used to be three or four hundred jobs in lounges,” he remembered. “They would have entertainment that would start like at ten in the morning and go until four in the morning. That would leave them six hours to clean up the lounge … and it would start all over again, seven days a week.” At a time when a loaf of bread cost about a quarter and soft drinks were a dime, Massagli earned nearly $200 a week.¹³

Denise Miller’s experience paralleled Massagli’s. Miller was a professional dancer who moved to Las Vegas at midcentury at age eighteen to work at the Flamingo. She had earlier worked as a dancer in Chicago before moving to Los Angeles, only to find her career floundering there. “I was starving to death in Los Angeles,” she recalled. “I had decided to work as a secretary but I couldn’t make a living.” A chance to work at the Flamingo was therefore appealing: “I was offered a job to come to Las Vegas, and I snatched at it because it was twice the pay that I was making as a secretary.” The city impressed her instantly. “When I found Las Vegas,” she recollected, “I thought I found paradise. It was a little town that had the hotels so I could work at my trade. I really thought I had found heaven.” Miller worked six weeks at the Flamingo and then a year at the Last Frontier with the Katherine Duffy Dancers. When the producer moved the group to the Thunder-bird, Miller went along and worked there more than a year.¹⁴

Her work required dedication and long hours. Miller worked two shows a night six nights a week, and spent countless daytime hours rehearsing. The Duffy Dancers changed their routines every few weeks, which meant Miller often rehearsed “all day” and danced at night. “A new set of muscles were always hurting,” she recounted. Dancers had to learn new routines quickly and show versatility in performing them. “We danced to everything imaginable,” Miller said. “You had to do a can-can one week and a true ballet dance the following week. You had to be able to do a minstrel show, work a tambourine, beat a snare drum, work on roller skates, rubber balls, and jump rope through hoops.” Miller took pride in her work and enjoyed it. “I wouldn’t have traded it for anything,” she said. Unfortunately, jobs like Miller’s were for the young only; Miller’s dance career lasted less than a decade.¹⁵

Reminiscences of Julie Menard, who worked as a showgirl at the Tropicana in these years, breathed a similar excitement and commitment to work, and spoke to the relevance of gender in the workplace. The gender typing of some jobs worked to the advantage of young women like Menard. Showgirls were not professionals by any traditional definition. Most of them did little more than trip across the stage in highly choreographed patterns while scantily and revealingly clad. Their presence lent beauty and glamour to shows and thus to the tourist’s Las Vegas experience. Showgirls were young, in their late teens or twenties, tall, nice looking, and white. The only African American showgirls in Las Vegas in these years worked at a short-lived resort named the Moulin Rouge, northwest of the railroad station in the predominantly black section of Las Vegas.¹⁶

Menard moved to Las Vegas from Los Angeles in 1964, at the age of twenty-one. She had studied modeling, had a striking profile (nearly six feet tall, long blond hair, and size 38D brassiere), and quickly landed a job in the “Folies Bergere.” This was a fast-paced dance show featuring more than a dozen “girls” in sequined bikinis and feathered headpieces. She typically performed two shows a night, for six nights a week, for which she earned about $200 a week. Her job was more difficult than audiences imagined. She had to wear uncomfortably high heels and a tall, cumbersome headdress, and to get from her dressing room to her backstage position, she had to climb up a steep, potentially dangerous ladder. On stage, she had to walk down another steep staircase without handrails, with extended arms and eyes on the audience. She nonetheless liked the job, as did most showgirls. “A lot of it was a lot of fun,” Menard recalled. “You’re like a celebrity.” Indeed, showgirls were often treated as such. Casino managers gave them money to wander through the crowds and gamble after the show, and let them keep their winnings. “We were treated well, everything was nice,” Menard recalled.¹⁷

Hundreds of women had less glamorous jobs in the resort industry as wardrobe workers. Every large resort employed a dozen or more seamstresses and costume makers, even those that purchased ready-made costumes from outside sources. These skilled women worked in rooms directly behind the stage, fitting or repairing or decorating costumes with sequins, rhinestones, or other trim. As the occasion demanded, they also redesigned costumes, turning long gowns into short ones, for example, or changing plantation outfits into western wear. They also made emergency repairs during shows, replacing elastic in tights, perhaps, or replacing zippers. Wardrobe workers also helped dress performers for shows and assisted them with quick changes of clothing during performances. Some of these showtime assistants worked in dressing rooms near the stage, others in designated spots where they met entertainers coming off stage. The latter especially worked on rigid time schedules that they rehearsed with the casts of the shows. In the rehearsals, they learned to follow designated “cues” that signaled the onset of their tasks. They often had additional duties as makeup artists and hairdressers, for example.¹⁸

The reflections of Mae Burke, a longtime time head wardrobe mistress at the Tropicana, show the patterns of employment among such workers and offer an example of a worker’s success story in Las Vegas. Burke moved to the city from Buffalo, New York, after the war, with no thought of a career in wardrobing. Trained as a nurse, Burke could also sew, and through friends found a part-time job as a wardrobe worker at El Rancho. She later took a similar job at the Royal Nevada and then at the Tropicana when it opened in 1957. There, she began taking on supervisory responsibilities and eventually became head of the wardrobing department. In the latter capacity, she worked five nights and an afternoon or two a week, earning about 50 percent more than each of the twenty employees she supervised. Before each nightly show, Burke checked costumes and assigned workers to positions off stage. She oversaw the workers during performances, assisting or reassigning them as needed. After each show, she inventoried the wardrobe, and ordered repairs or supplies as necessary. In addition, she prepared work schedules, distributed payroll checks, and dealt with grievances. Her biggest challenge, she later recalled, was a problem endemic to supervisors in all the resorts—dealing with the rapid turnover in her workforce. “When there’s a change in the cast,” she explained, “we alter costumes. Then we buy new shoes. There’s a constant turnover—it’s quite a chore to keep up with changes in the cast.”¹⁹

Stagehands were another skilled group of entertainment employees. Their tasks were to prepare sets for showrooms, operate equipment during performances, and “strike” sets for later performances. Set construction entailed carpentry, the most important skill involved in the craft, and occasionally welding skills, if the construction of stage props involved steel. Lighted sets required the skills of electricians. Less-skilled stagehands hung curtains to rise and fall from “fly lofts” or roll quickly off stage. Others operated spotlights, soundboards, special effects equipment, and a variety of other devices, including video and motion picture equipment, to create whatever effects the show at hand necessitated. Like orchestra musicians in resorts, they typically worked six nights a week, for which they earned perhaps $250 to $300 a week in the late 1960s.²⁰

Joe Moll, a stagehand at the Sands in these years, recounted the story of his long-term employment in the industry. Moll moved to Las Vegas from California in 1952, after a stint in the Air Force. He had studied electrical engineering and worked as a movie projectionist, which enabled him to get a job at the Sands operating sound and lighting equipment, from which he moved into positions of greater responsibility. Still at the Sands twenty-five years later, Moll was then head of the stagehands department. When a local newspaper ran a story commemorating his long tenure at the resort, Moll emphasized the positive aspects of his own work and that of his fellow stagehands. “It’s always been a well paid profession,” he explained. His routines were interesting and challenging. “I haven’t been bored one day in the whole time,” he said. “It’s a challenging, exciting job,” he added. “Shows change frequently, and even if the incoming act is one you’ve worked with for ten years, his show is always different.”²¹

The life of Virgil Kist further highlights the abilities, ambitions, and mobility of workers in this category. Kist grew up on a farm in Iowa and joined the Ring-ling Brothers Circus as a teenager in the 1930s. He had learned mechanical skills on the farm and then how to “rig” and “strike” stages in the circus. After serving in the army during World War II, he sought work as a stagehand in New York, without luck. He relocated to Las Vegas in 1960 and found steady work there as a stagehand. By the mid-1970s he had worked at various resorts on the Strip, including the Thunderbird, the Desert Inn, the Tropicana, and the Dunes, in such varied capacities as rigger, carpenter, welder, and electrician. One of his sons, Dennis, remembered his father as one who “could do a little of everything.” The fact that Virgil Kist had a wife and five children to support partly explained his willingness to take on all jobs.²²

Workers’ recollections about other sectors of employment are equally revealing. Many of the industry’s employees worked in fast-paced casinos, where to some of them the excitement seemed never to stop. In 1970 major resorts along the Strip employed between one hundred and two hundred dealers. They operated card or dice games, such as poker, twenty-one, baccarat, or craps; spun roulette wheels; or ran bingo games. Still others were keno writers or took bets on sporting events.²³ Each of these activities involved its own expertise and even language, and the rapid pace required experience, concentration, and swift execution. In a single hour, a dealer might make hundreds of mathematical calculations while relying on tools unique to each game, such as sticks, markers, and buttons and dice.²⁴ In the early 1970s, dealers were still overwhelmingly white men. The only black dealers in Las Vegas at that time worked in gambling clubs in the “colored” section of town.

The story of Marvin Vallone illustrates these patterns. Vallone, an Italian American from New York, learned to play table games as a child. “We used to shoot craps behind the store, and play cards,” he reminisced. Vallone moved to Las Vegas in 1956 to get away from cold weather. “When I came here in the winter time and there was no snow and no rain, I said this is where I wanted to live,” he recalled. “I really like it.” Married with children when he moved to the city, Vallone rented a two-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas and, with help from a relative who already lived in the city, found a job as a “shill” at the Boulder Club downtown. For $8 a day, he sat at a gaming table making bets with house money, acting the part of an involved gambler in order to attract other gamblers. When business was slow, other employees taught him the finer points of casino games. “When there was nothing to do,” he recalled, “they would give you a chance to break-in. They would teach you.” This break-in system was mutually beneficial. It provided management cheap labor and workers job training.²⁵

The training set Vallone on his career path, which ultimately enabled him to achieve middle-class living standards. In 1958 he became a craps dealer at the Horseshoe, earning $25 a day in wages, plus gratuities. Two years later, he moved to the Showboat, where the tips were better, and where he made “$30 to $35 a day.” A former supervisor from the Boulder Club hired him at the Tropicana in 1966, where “tokes,” as tips were known, averaged about $50 a day. Though Vallone remembered that wages and working conditions at the Tropicana were “excellent,” he nonetheless moved to Caesars Palace the following year. By 1973, when he moved to the new MGM Grand, Vallone had been in gaming for more than fifteen years and had seen his income rise steadily; by then he owned his own home with a swimming pool. This outcome was the result not only of Vallone’s work and skills but of the rapid growth of the resort industry and the attendant availability of good jobs for experienced workers at ever-increasing wages. It seems that Vallone’s success was typical for reliable workers who persisted in the resort industry after acquiring the skills the industry needed and rewarded.²⁶

Yvonne Mattes, a switchboard operator at the Sands in these years, suggested that workers in less exhilarating jobs could also find their work satisfying, that they too saw something exciting about working in Las Vegas. Mattes arrived from Bakersfield, California, in 1962, after her husband accepted a job with the Las Vegas Police Department. Her experience as a telephone operator at Edwards Air Force Base in California helped her get a similar job at the Mint Hotel downtown. After a few months there, she moved to the Sands, where she received a “big jump” in pay to $18 a shift. Mattes remembered working in ten-woman crews, six of whom answered incoming calls while three handled show reservations and the other one made wake-up calls. Mattes rejected the notion that work at the switchboard was low skilled or uninteresting. “Everybody thinks operators are stupid, but it’s not true,” she said. “It’s mind-boggling what they have to know, what they have to remember.” Among those bits of information were requests from hotel guests, seating arrangements in showrooms, and directions in and around Las Vegas. One of her major challenges was to stay calm when dealing with angry or demanding callers. “We had to lie sometimes,” Mattes recalled, “if people said to say they weren’t there. We always had to be nice.” Mattes had no complaints about the work. “I liked my job, really liked it,” she said. “It was never boring.” One source of excitement, she remembered, was talking to personalities like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra. “I liked seeing them.”²⁷

Workers in food and beverage services generally recalled their work in less enthusiastic terms, yet their attitudes about working in Las Vegas varied widely. Cary Petersen, who moved to Las Vegas from Chicago, offered testimony about a general pattern in which jobs were readily available. Petersen began working as a busboy at the Union Plaza, at the age of fifteen, but he soon became a dishwasher and “worked his way up” into the ranks of cooks. He learned new cooking skills on the job, by watching others. “I started watching the cooks,” he later explained. “They gave me a chance to get in the pantry. It was right next to the egg station and this guy taught me how to do eggs, how to flip them.” “Little by little,” Petersen learned the tasks of a broiler chef, for which he earned more money. He found the work challenging, even exciting at times. “I always thought cooking was kinda neat,” he later said, “not boring.”²⁸

Jeanne Mead’s memories of her work as a waitress in the city suggest something similar. Mead, with several years of experience as a waitress, moved to Las Vegas from Colorado in 1956. As a single mother of two, Mead needed a job immediately. She found one in a downtown coffee shop. “I went to the union not long after I came to town, and I got a job that day,” she remembered. It was a “non-stop” job, however, and Mead found the constant work tiring. Within a year, she moved to the new Hacienda Hotel on the Strip, where she felt “more relaxed.” “I liked it from the start,” she said of the job, “I liked it very much.” Tips were better at the Hacienda, and the “atmosphere” was too. The dining room in which Mead worked overlooked a swimming pool and a garden, which made her work environment “very pleasant.” She also liked the owners of the Hacienda, Warren and Judy Bayley, whom she remembered as “fair” and “kind.” “I got along well with management,” she recalled.²⁹

Other food and beverage servers were more critical of their jobs and supervisors. Overbearing managers and difficult co-workers seem to have been numerous in this area of work, though there is no way to quantify that observation. Waiting was typically busy and stressful work, and wait people were usually exhausted at the end of their shifts, from aching backs or feet, if not from dealing with demanding customers or supervisors or uncooperative co-workers. They had little time to be friendly with customers, or to provide them with the kind of service many guests expected. They often worked without breaks, either from concern for customers or co-workers or from fear of falling behind in their work. Cocktail waitresses often had to wear uncomfortable or skimpy costumes and deal with groping or rowdy customers. “I’m sick and tired of being pinched like a tomato,” one of them complained. Some waitresses developed strategies to ward off such attention. “The first thing I did when I got my first job was to buy a wedding ring,” one of them recalled. “Nothing would cool a pass quicker than to wave that band before a guy and tell him my man’s a security guard.”³⁰ Another longtime waiter summed up his attitude about waiting when he advised young co-workers to quit their jobs. “Get your education and get out,” he warned, “because you get stuck in this business if you don’t.”³¹

The recollections of Alma Whitney, a housekeeper at the Desert Inn for thirty-five years, spoke to the challenge of working the jobs low-skilled workers were obliged to take. Whitney was an African American who thus faced special challenges in Las Vegas, where most housekeepers in the industry were blacks. Whitney moved to Las Vegas from Tallulah, Louisiana, in 1952, at the age of sixteen. Like many other African Americans, she left family and friends to find a better life. “I had a little girl,” she explained, “and I came [to Las Vegas] to work, so I could help support her.” She traveled to Las Vegas in the automobile of a man who made his living driving poor black southerners to jobs in other parts of the country, stopping only for gas. “At that time, you couldn’t stop, no place, you know, not blacks,” Whitney explained.³² The grueling, three-day trip was one small sign of the problems African Americans faced in the age of segregation.

In Las Vegas, Whitney found a job as a maid at a motel off the Strip. Six months later she got work at the Desert Inn. At both places, she was responsible for cleaning about a dozen rooms a day, six days a week. She thought the workload reasonable, but cleaning windows and tubs was difficult. “I had a glass that went from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling,” she remembered. “You got a great big tub that you had to get in and try to do,” she added. Whitney’s difficulties varied with the habits of hotel guests. Guests who left their rooms a mess created problems for housekeepers. “Some of those people leave those rooms in a hell of a fix,” Whitney explained. “Some of them, you’d almost hate to go in them.” Children presented special problems. Not only did they often leave messes to be cleaned up, but they slept on roll-away beds which had to be stripped, folded, and put outside for porters to carry away. “I would hate for summer to come, when they come up with those kids.” It was “pretty rough,” she said of her job.³³

Like other resort workers, Whitney saw gaming and related activities as her own means of realizing the American dream. Her ardor and perseverance reflected her personal ambitions, which grew out of her background and family obligations. She viewed her job in Las Vegas against the backdrop of her previous hopeless poverty in Louisiana. She had been accustomed to physical work but not to steady wages or job benefits. A job that offered those advantages was a veritable boon to her. Las Vegas thus represented opportunity, a way of making it for herself and her child. That might not have seemed like much to most Americans then or now, but the perspective that mattered most for understanding Whitney’s situation was hers, not ours. The same might be said of the Italian American Marvin Vallone, who was willing to take an $8-a-day job as a shill to begin his journey of “making it” in Las Vegas on the way to a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. For Whitney no less than Vallone, the life story as it relates to employment in the Las Vegas resort industry was a marvelous success story.

Security employees were among the most essential workers in resorts. Their chief concern was thievery, the opportunity for which was everywhere. A million dollars in cash might pass daily through a sizable resort casino, some of it literally spilling on the floor around slot machines. Resorts invested heavily in security, against armed bandits as well as individuals trying to rig casino games or tamper with slot machines. Employee theft was also a large and constant problem. Workers who handled cash, luggage, and other valuable property had chances to help themselves to what they handled, and when they did so, they harmed their employers.

The size and structure of security forces varied from place to place. Most resorts employed a security chief and provided him a staff of assistants and uniformed guards. At the Aladdin in 1973, for example, a chief and his lieutenant had responsibility for policing the resort and enforcing security policies. They were assisted by three sergeants and sixteen guards. The sergeants were middle managers or foremen in the security operation, assigning guards to posts and moving them around as necessary. They also evaluated the work of guards in written reports that commented on, among other items, their reliability and skills. Sergeants lacked the authority to fire guards, but they could suspend them pending investigation by the chief. Sergeants also delegated responsibilities to experienced and trusted guards. These “shift leaders” made sure guards manned their posts and handled incidents properly.³⁴

The duties of guards at resorts included patrolling designated areas. Patrols often worked in teams of two, walking in opposite directions from one other, while guards usually worked alone. After responding to “incidents,” both wrote brief reports, or completed standard forms answering prepared questions. Every on-duty security person had the power to detain unruly or violent guests and guests suspected of illegal behavior. Most detentions involved individuals who had been “drinking to excess” or were “obviously drunk.” Each resort also assigned guards to entrances at which employees reported for work and punched time clocks. These “time keepers” protected the clocks and punch cards and prevented nonemployees from using the entrance. They also inspected the bags of departing employees to prevent the stealing of resort property. The area in which these guards worked was the “time office,” which also served as home base for security workers. There, their supervisors had offices, their work schedules were posted, and they encountered each other at the beginning and ending of shifts. Like security guards in other service industries, they wore uniforms issued by employers, including identification badges and handcuffs, but not firearms, which the guards themselves furnished according to employer specifications.³⁵

The backgrounds of security guards varied considerably. Resorts preferred experienced workers, but sometimes settled for whomever they could get. A few guards at the Four Queens in these years had previously worked in security at other resorts; prior experience in security work for most of them, however, was at such places as airports and retail stores. Some had been police officers outside Las Vegas, and a few had been military police. Several had no experience in the field. Frequent turnover of security employees, which in some resorts exceeded 50 percent annually, threatened and even compromised security services and was a constant source of anxiety for management officials. Low levels of pay largely accounted for the turnover problem. Sergeants and guards made little more than the minimum wage.³⁶

After interviewing George Rahas, director of security at the Sahara in the 1970s, a local journalist in Las Vegas concluded that security work at the resort was difficult and complex. Officers at the Sahara, he found, patrolled more than twenty-seven acres of land, the site of a one-thousand-room hotel, dozens of hallways and stairwells, and a popular casino that never closed. According to Rahas, it took experienced, well-trained officers to keep the Sahara safe. “We hire only ex-police officers for our security force,” he explained in the article. “If an applicant has been trained as a policeman, we can give him the other training necessary for hotel and gaming security.” The additional training was in areas of public safety and assistance specific to resorts and in the operation of the resort’s televised surveillance systems. It also included training in how to recognize cheating scams involving electronic devices, special counters, and dishonest dealers and how to detect suspicious persons and behavior. Rahas maintained a file on more than thirty-five hundred people who had in the past threatened, or who might in the future threaten, the well-being of the resort, including car thieves, pimps, and prostitutes as well as gambling cheats. “We add eighty photos and descriptions a month,” said Rahas, whose own background reflected the experience and skills necessary for his position. Before moving to Las Vegas, Rahas had attended Brooklyn Law School, served in the U.S. Army intelligence in Germany, and worked as a federal narcotics agent in New York City.³⁷

The introduction of new surveillance systems demonstrated how technological innovations could affect work routines as well as the balance of power between labor and management. In the postwar years, security employees generally detected theft in casinos by observing dealers and gamblers, often from “catwalks” in casino ceilings. By the 1970s, however, security employees worked in surveillance monitoring rooms, where they operated “smart” cameras which they glided along ceiling rails and “zoomed-in” on suspicious activity or on workers or players suspected of cheating. When the employees saw something suspicious, they switched on machines to film the event and record the conversations of participants. The installation, operation, and maintenance of such equipment significantly increased the skill requirements for security personnel while they eliminated the jobs of many traditional security workers. The new equipment not only helped employers identify dishonest dealers but enhanced their ability to supervise and evaluate other employees. Management used the equipment to detect employees who performed poorly and to improve work routines. As resorts grew in size, management committed more and more resources to these systems. The surveillance of work therefore increased, especially in casinos, which had the most comprehensive surveillance equipment. The days when “bosses” ruled casinos gave way to an era of technological oversight.³⁸

There is little evidence to suggest that resort workers came to Las Vegas with a sense of group consciousness, but most joined trade unions once they were there. Unions have had a relatively strong and successful presence in Las Vegas since the early twentieth century, when the Union Pacific Railroad set up repair shops and supply yards just north of downtown. During construction of Hoover Dam in the 1930s, several unions in the building trades organized local affiliates and created circumstances in which other unions could thrive. By midcentury, Las Vegas was a “union town,” and a few unions were well established in the resorts, representing workers in every major occupational category except casino dealing and security.³⁹ By the 1970s, about two-thirds of the area’s resort workers belonged to unions, including such diverse groups as bartenders, desk clerks, maids, musicians, stagehands, waiters, and waitresses.

Most of the unions were craft based, that is, they included employees in a single occupational group or craft. They were also generally affiliates of national unions and subordinate to the nationals in various ways. The local unions were democratic to the extent that their effective operating heads were elected, and administrative functions were in the hands of people responsible to the elected head. Members had opportunities to influence policy making in business meetings and through strike-authorization votes. In all areas of employment where employees were unionized, workers were required to join the union and pay their dues to secure employment and maintain their jobs. Participation in union meetings was typically low. Top officials in the unions in the postwar period were experienced craftsmen who had worked their way up through the union hierarchy. All of them were salaried and had staffs of salaried assistants. The most powerful individual in each union was typically the secretary-treasurer, who usually held office for an extended period of time, not the president, a largely honorary official. The secretary-treasurer oversaw the administration of union business and had traditionally headed the collective bargaining team. By the 1970s, however, the chief union negotiators had become union lawyers.

Like the union members they represented, Las Vegas labor leaders were not Marxists bent on transforming capitalist relations of production in the resort industry. Instead, they were practical-minded men of affairs who wanted a bigger piece of the capitalist pie for themselves and the workers they represented. “Our chief long-range goal,” as one of them said, “is to improve the wages, hours and working conditions of our members and organize the unorganized wherever they may be.”⁴⁰ As long as the real income of union members improved and their circumstances in the workplace were tolerable, these men gave employers a free hand in other aspects of management. In collective bargaining, in other words, jobs, wages, and benefits trumped liberal concerns about industrial democracy, gender and racial equality, and other social reforms. When the Vietnam War became the most controversial issue in domestic affairs, union leaders in Las Vegas had little to say about it, at least in public, or about American foreign policy generally, or antiwar protest. Many, perhaps most of them, had served in the armed forces during World War II, and that experience no doubt modeled their ideas about the nation and patriotism. Positions of union leadership were caps on their careers, not platforms from which they sought to reform the nation or the world.

Union leaders operated within the constraints of federal law and bureaucracy. They benefited from provisions of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which required employers to recognize legitimately established unions and bargain with them in good faith. That act created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), a generally union-friendly bureaucracy, to enforce its provisions. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1948 restricted some of the union-friendly provisions of the earlier act. Among other things, it outlawed spur-of-the-moment “wildcat” strikes and made it easier for employers to restrict picketing activity during strikes and to decertify established unions. The act also declared arbitration the “most desirable” method for settling workplace disputes, a process that often benefited unions. During World War II, the federal government established rules for arbitrating labor disputes, recognized groups of arbitrators to settle them, and made their findings binding on parties to an arbitrated dispute. After the war, arbitrators developed their own professional association and code of ethics and made their services available to employers and unions across the country. In the period of this study, labor and management in the Las Vegas resort industry routinely relied on arbitration to resolve a wide range of disagreements over everything from collective bargaining itself to the meaning of the language in contracts already in effect.

A major source of union power in postwar America was the ability to control the labor supply, at least in unionized locales. In Las Vegas, unions found various ways to do that. Some limited the number of people who could train locally for certain jobs, and required experienced workers who moved to Las Vegas to wait out “transfer periods,” during which time they could not accept fulltime unionized jobs. In most states, unions also controlled the labor supply by establishing “closed shops,” that is, by requiring employers to hire only union members. In Nevada, however, voters approved a right-to-work initiative in 1952, which outlawed that practice. Specifically, the initiative prohibited labor organizations and their officers from compelling people to join a union or to strike against their will, and it prevented employers from discriminating against nonunion workers in hiring. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1948 had earlier imposed restrictions on the closed shop and permitted states to impose additional restrictions. By 1952 more than a dozen states had done so in so-called right-to-work laws, either by statute or by constitutional amendment.⁴¹

The right-to-work movement amounted to a public and political backlash against the gains organized labor had made under the New Deal in the 1930s, and against the costly wave of strikes that afflicted American industry in 1945–46. In Nevada, however, the movement was chiefly an effort to restrain labor costs and a means of attracting new businesses to the state. It began not in Las Vegas but in Reno, where in the late 1940s business and civic leaders invoked the language and tactics of open-shop advocates to resist union organizing efforts in the warehousing and tourist industries. They called unions “coercive,” “un-American” institutions that raised wages above their “natural” levels and thus discouraged business development.⁴² The movement gained momentum after July 4, 1949, when unions in Reno struck local restaurants and hotels at the height of the tourist season. The strike, which lasted six days, ended in a settlement that brought tourism workers higher wages and benefits but convinced many residents that unions harmed the public interest. In the aftermath of the strike, business and community leaders in Reno formed the Nevada Citizens Committee to circulate petitions for a ballot initiative to outlaw the closed shop. Narrowly, voters approved the initiative in 1952 and rejected referenda to repeal it in 1954 and 1956. Unions abandoned the effort to repeal the law in 1958, when Nevada made it more difficult to put initiatives on the ballot.⁴³

Over the years, the right-to-work law was a source of political acrimony that had little effect on the Las Vegas resort industry. By 1952 resort owners there already recognized and dealt with the unions that represented most of their employees. They also hired most of their workers through union hiring halls, a practice that amounted to a closed shop. Owners continued this practice after the state outlawed compulsory union membership, not just to placate the unions but because it was an effective way of finding new workers in their rapidly expanding industry. Job seekers established their qualifications and joined the appropriate union at the hiring halls, and union agents referred qualified workers to employers who requested them. In this process, the agents seem to have functioned as screeners for management. They had no incentive to recommend unqualified applicants or otherwise disturb the working relationships they had with industry managers. In return, employers agreed to hire union members and pay them union wages and benefits. In this regard, labor and management were partners in the rapidly expanding resort industry in Las Vegas.⁴⁴

The unions’ chief source of power in the industry was their ability to stop work, which explains why employers cooperated with them in such areas as hiring practices. Work stoppages always hurt the industry, but they were dangerous weapons and often harmful to workers as well. Neither labor nor management ever desired a strike; but each on occasion concluded that a strike was the lesser of the evil choices it believed it faced. Though strikes were always about money matters first, they usually also involved fundamental concerns of workers’ rights and management prerogatives. Threats to strike were basic parts of collective bargaining and typically occurred in the late stages of bargaining, just before labor contracts expired. In this process, both sides played bluffing games, and, more often than not, one side effectively called the other’s bluff and a work stoppage was averted. When that was not the case, it was because union leaders, with the approval of union members by secret ballot in widely publicized elections, concluded that a strike was necessary. National unions, which helped provide strike benefits to workers, also usually approved the strike.⁴⁵

Union strength also derived from the services unions provided their members. By the 1960s in the Las Vegas resort industry, these services included health and welfare programs to which employers contributed. The programs provided medical services, retirement pensions, and life or disability insurance. They also offered a host of lesser services, from counseling and legal assistance to low-interest loans and special credit card rates. Union headquarters sometimes served as centers of social activity where workers met new friends. During work stoppages, the headquarters became gathering places where union leaders disseminated information and set up rudimentary child-care and picketer-care centers as well as “strike kitchens.”

The Clark County Central Labor Council oversaw union activity in and around Las Vegas. The council included representatives of every major union in the county and functioned to encourage labor solidarity and joint union activity. It had no executive authority over affiliated unions and no role in collective bargaining; it did, however, sanction strikes and encourage its affiliates to honor the picket lines of striking workers. The council also had political and educational functions, endorsing political candidates who supported organized labor, and training union representatives in contract negotiations and labor law.⁴⁶ In doing so, the council cooperated with the Nevada State Federation of Labor. The federation’s annual conventions provided opportunities for resort workers and their unions to air their problems and concerns. Unions in the building trades generally dominated the federation, especially in the early postwar years, though those in the resort industry became more influential over the period of this study. The federation served primarily to keep member unions abreast of legislative bills affecting organized labor and identifying political candidates friendly to labor.⁴⁷

Service workers constitute a diverse and complex group of workers, and their jobs are likewise complex and varied. Intricate patterns lay behind their work in Las Vegas tourism. Their skills varied as did the demands and rewards of their work. The rapid turnover among them suggests that work, especially perhaps among women, was less central to their lives than other things such as family. Work was for most a necessity but for some a choice. And among the choices many of the workers made was where to work. The lure of one of the nation’s fastest-growing and most fascinating cities, and of work in one of its most expansive and distinctive industries, cannot be gainsaid in explaining the story of work in Las Vegas in the period of this study. “People was very encouraged to come to Las Vegas cause it was somewhere to come to,” a former maid in the industry recalled. “Las Vegas was hopping, you hear me?”⁴⁸