3. The First Work Stoppages

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

No 3
The First Work Stoppages

For more than two decades after World War II, when Las Vegas resorts operated as proprietorships or small partnerships, employers and unions enjoyed generally amicable relationships. Employers offered union workers steady pay raises, increasing job security, and expanding benefits in return for labor peace. By the late 1960s and early 1970s the corporate form of ownership was rapidly displacing proprietorships and partnerships, and as that transformation occurred, new patterns in industrial relations emerged. Outlooks on both sides of the workplace also began to change. Corporate employers soon organized a vigorous trade association to advance their mutual interests and took increasingly aggressive and calculating stances in collective bargaining. In response, workers and unions had to fight with unaccustomed assiduity to protect and improve what they already had in wages and benefits and to preserve important prerogatives in the workplace. The results of the rising tensions and antagonisms in these circumstances were the first strikes in the Las Vegas resort industry.

The timing of the first strikes reflected not only structural changes in the Las Vegas resort industry but also larger patterns of change in American economic life. In the postwar years after 1946–47, union workers across the country negotiated long-term contracts that meaningfully boosted income and encouraged a sense of security and well-being among them. Though the ups and downs of business cycles were periodically troubling, industrial relations remained relatively harmonious. Strikes were typically short and peaceful and seldom took a heavy toll on workers. By the late 1960s, however, changing economic and political realities began to threaten this equilibrium to the disadvantage of union workers. Established understandings in collective bargaining, what historians call postwar “social accords,” began to break down. Work environments and bargaining processes turned volatile. In the 1970s and 1980s, work stoppages often hurt workers materially and emotionally. These trends even affected the story of labor relations in “boom towns” like Las Vegas.

In postwar Las Vegas, when places like the Sands and the Stardust opened on the Strip, resort owners and their employees interacted in a workplace that was relatively relaxed and free of systematic tensions. The basic circumstance of their interaction was familiar enough. Owners wanted to maximize profits without generating labor disputes; and employees wanted higher wages, as much say-so as they could get in the workplace, and job security. Both groups had measures of control over the work process, which they used to whatever advantages they could get. The situation varied from resort to resort, but everywhere compromise typically trumped conflict, and most resorts were relatively free of structured workplace tensions.

Management systems and attitudes largely explained this situation. Though owners delegated the day-to-day supervision of wage earners to salaried assistants, they often came into contact with employees. Whenever they did, they tended to act more like paternal figures than profit-minded businessmen. Though some were more accessible than others, most knew the names of their longtime employees, even the names of their spouses and children. Like southern textile owners of an earlier day, many of whom were looked up to by their employees as tolerable paternalists, resort owners in postwar Las Vegas treated wage earners in human rather than categorical terms. They asked employees about their health and family life, gave them flowers or other tokens of personal concern on special occasions, and might hand out Christmas-time bonuses or certificates for things like hams and turkeys. “It all depends on how long you had worked there,” one former maid at the Desert Inn explained of the Christmas presents. “Some of us who had worked there about two or three weeks, they would give us between $25 and $50 bonus, and some of them that had been there longer, they got more,” she recalled. “I had enough I could get my kids all their toys.”¹ Though attitudes toward individual employees depended on a wide range of circumstances, the divide between owners and workers was muted by acts of paternal concern that workers appreciated.

The recollections of Jeanne Mead, a former waitress at the Hacienda illustrate this sense of intimacy and paternalism. They also suggest that workers appreciated this style of management. “When the Bayleys had the Hacienda it was a real nice place to work,” Mead said of Warren Bayley and his wife Judy (who ran the resort for several years after her husband died in 1964). “They were beautiful people to work for,” Mead recalled. “If you were sick they sent flowers. If you had a sick child or something they might inquire about him. You felt that they cared and consequently you wanted to do your best for them too.” “It was a family-like hotel,” she added.² Mead’s perspective on management showed the kind of give-and-take that often characterized the postwar work environment. It revealed how employers could lift the spirit and morale of their employees by simple and inexpensive acts of concern and, in doing so, enhance a feeling of fealty toward themselves. “I had pride in the hotel,” Mead recalled.³ Owners like the Bayleys were not distant stockholders who knew little of the day-to-day operations of the resorts they owned or what employment in their resorts meant in personal terms to the mass of people who worked for them.

Owners also generally understood what mattered to local union leaders, whom they also knew personally and with whom they maintained good business-like relations. Every year or two, union representatives met with individual property owners to hammer out details of labor agreements, which dealt in a straightforward fashion with wages, hiring, and workplace concerns. The parties typically began by resolving nonmoney issues, chiefly relating to the rules of work; then addressed fringe benefits, which as cost items were then still of secondary importance; and, finally, wages. At that point management calculated the costs of proposed changes in work rules, job benefits, and wage increases. When these items were agreed upon orally, the negotiations ended with a handshake, and the two sides wrote up and signed a written and official version of what they had agreed upon.

Negotiations between resort owners and Local 226 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union (HERE), popularly known as “the Culinary” and hereafter referred to by that name in this study, typically set collective bargaining patterns in the industry. The Culinary was then and is now the largest organization of Las Vegas resort workers. Established in 1938, this local quickly became the area’s most powerful union. In the 1960s it had more than ten thousand members and roughly twice that number ten years later.⁴ Unlike unions of hotel and restaurant workers elsewhere, the Culinary included not only kitchen workers, narrowly defined, but housekeepers, bellmen, banquet servers, cocktail waitresses, and other “front-of-the-house” workers as well. It was, then, an industrial rather than a craft union, which accounts for its size. It organized and bargained for occupational groups that were relatively low skilled and low paid. The union had close ties with Local 165 of the Bartenders and Beverage Dispensers Union, a much smaller organization, including joint bargaining arrangements.⁵

A strike by the Culinary could shut down resorts. With workers in smaller unions, such as those of musicians or stagehands, owners might operate on a limited or temporary basis when they struck, but not without the people in the Culinary. Owners therefore tried to resolve issues with this union first and then finalized their agreements with the smaller organizations on the basis of guidelines agreed to by the Culinary. The Culinary always insisted that owners provide those organizations wage hikes and benefits comparable to those it agreed to for its own members, and the potential of a sympathy strike by the big union encouraged the owners to do so. Though Taft-Hartley prohibited unions themselves from calling sympathy strikes, language in union contracts often permitted individual members of unions to consult their conscience on whether to cross the picket lines of other workers. This “picket line clause” strengthened in vital ways the bargaining power of unions in Las Vegas, for it enabled union negotiators to threaten a general strike whenever bargaining broke down.⁶

The strength of the Culinary in the postwar period can be attributed not only to its size but also to the effectiveness of Elmer “Al” Bramlet, who headed the union from 1954 until his untimely death in 1977. Bramlet shared the working-class background of the men and women his union represented. Raised on a small farm in Arkansas, he worked first as a dishwasher in Joliet, Illinois, and then served in the navy during World War II. After his discharge, Bramlet settled in Los Angeles, where he bartended and then served as a business agent for the local bartenders union. In 1946 the union sent him to Las Vegas to help the Culinary. Over the following decade, he worked tirelessly to increase that union’s membership. He even made recruiting trips through southern and southwestern towns, recruiting hundreds of workers into diners, restaurants, and other eateries in Las Vegas, where they found jobs that paid more than they had ever earned. Bramlet drove many of them to Las Vegas himself, directly to the Culinary’s hiring hall. For such dedication, in 1954 he became secretary-treasurer of the union, a post he held until his death.⁷

Bramlet was less committed to a political agenda than, say, Cesar Chavez or Walter Reuther, other prominent labor leaders of the time; nonetheless, for more than two decades, he furthered the careers of labor-friendly politicians in Nevada. He served as an adviser to key figures in the state’s Democratic Party, including Governor Mike O’Callaghan, who held office from 1971 to 1978. His union’s endorsement could influence electoral results and thus further the interests of workers and unions. In the words of Berkeley Bunker, a congressman and then senator from Nevada, Bramlet was one of the most powerful people in the state. “If you have his backing, you have a lot of votes, because Al Bramlet is a very, very formidable political figure.”⁸ As Bunker recognized, political relationships were especially important in the state’s gaming industry because so many public officials had a say-so in its oversight. Bramlet could and often did use political connections to strengthen his union’s hand at the bargaining table.

In 1956 owners of nearly a dozen Strip properties formed the Nevada Industrial Council to bargain with Bramlet and other union leaders. The council hired Roy B. Flippin, a retired army colonel, to head the council and lead its bargaining team. Flippin had little experience in bargaining or indeed in labor relations. He was a “cowboy” who bred Arabian horses and ran a riding stable outside Las Vegas. He had, however, been chief negotiator since 1948 for the Southern Nevada Employers Association, a diverse group of proprietors in such tourist-related businesses as restaurants, commercial cleaners, and food and beverage distributors. Despite the potential for confrontation in his new position, Flippin conducted his office and his duties in such a way that labor leaders in the Las Vegas tourist industry soon came to respect him for his conduct in bargaining sessions. He was “straight-talking” and “very laid back,” one of them recalled.⁹

The 1957 contract between the council and the Culinary illustrated the continued straightforwardness of bargaining after Flippin’s appointment. The contract was five pages in length. In it, the resorts recognized the participating unions as the “sole collective bargaining agency” for their members and pledged to hire workers through union hiring halls. Employers could hire “outside of the Union” only when the latter failed to provide “satisfactory” job applicants within a fixed period of time. The contract specified wages and working conditions for more than forty occupational groups, from dishwashers and chefs to cocktail waitresses and powder room maids. It also spelled out disciplinary and grievance procedures and stipulated that eight hours constituted a day’s work, and six eight-hour shifts a week’s work. Employees working such shifts were entitled to three meals a day at the employer’s expense, the last meal coming at the end of the shift. The contract also required employers to contribute $5.10 a month per employee to the union’s health and welfare funds, and gave nonstriking workers the right to honor picket lines sanctioned by the Clark County Central Labor Council.¹⁰

Union leaders later recalled the ease and straightforwardness of contractual negotiations in the years of Flippin’s service. They recalled casual negotiating sessions with Flippin and other members of his Industrial Council, in which bargaining parties settled differences in informal conversations of give-and-take. Mark Massagli of the musicians’ union, which had been chartered by the American Federation of Musicians in 1931, described this bargaining process as “very easy.” “We sat down with the guys who could make a deal,” he remembered, “guys” typically anxious to make a deal. “In two hours you’d have an agreement,” he recalled.¹¹ Dick Thomas of the Teamsters had similar recollections. “When I first got into the hotel business,” Thomas explained, “our contract was six pages … with maybe five or six articles.” “There were only a handful of people to do business with in those days, and you knew them all.” Thomas typically met informally with Roy Flippin three or four times before signing a contract on behalf of the Teamsters but never had serious problems resolving differences with the group Flippin represented. “There was nothing you couldn’t figure out a way to solve,” he later explained. Thomas attributed this straightforwardness and success to employers’ acceptance of trade unions and of the legitimacy of the workers’ concerns that the unions voiced in negotiations. “They didn’t have an argument with the union being there,” he said of the employers’ representatives in negotiations.

Las Vegas was no capitalist paradise, however. Resort owners were less effectively organized than many of the workers they employed in those years, which made it difficult to resist union demands. Moreover, some of them feared that work stoppages would draw attention to their gambling operations, which many Americans still wanted to outlaw. As long as profits were rising, they saw no need to confront the unions. Little versed in the economic or social rationales for collective bargaining, they knew that pay raises and job benefits ensured labor peace as well as a steady influx of new workers to Las Vegas, still a relatively isolated desert community. The Teamsters Central States Pension Fund may have been a factor in this relative tranquillity. The Teamsters made loans to entrepreneurs who provided jobs for its members, not to groups that resisted unions. Dick Thomas later acknowledged this stabilizing role of the fund in labor relations in Las Vegas. “It didn’t hurt,” he said.¹²

The owners took collective bargaining more seriously than the foregoing account may imply. The 1961 negotiations between the Industrial Council and the Culinary illustrate that point. Before those negotiations began, Roy Flippin called a meeting of the council. There, owners agreed that pay raises should be considerably less than the unions were asking and rejected union proposals on fringe benefits as too costly. Two days after the meeting, Flippin assembled his four-member negotiating team to discuss management’s bargaining strategy, and at the ensuing negotiations he rejected most union proposals. Unions ultimately received about half of what they asked for. Neither the substance, processes, nor outcome of the 1961 negotiations can be explained or documented, but union leaders who attended the negotiations suggested a power balance between bargaining parties as well as a willingness to compromise accounted for their own concessions.¹³

Perhaps some of these things have to do with the activities of one of the shadowy figures in Las Vegas history, Sidney Korshak, depicted in FBI records as a labor relations specialist who helped the parties in collective bargaining processes that involved underworld figures and interests to reach mutually satisfactory agreements on the issues at stake in their bargaining. Korshak’s involvement in the world of gambling dated back to the 1930s, when he fronted in Chicago for notorious underworld figures in their dealings with the public or the police. After the war, he worked as a labor relations consultant for the Chicago Hotel Association, which included several of the nation’s largest hotel chains, and helped several clients obtain loans from the Teamster’s pension fund to invest in gambling enterprises in Las Vegas. The FBI kept Korshak under surveillance in those years and believed him to be the “man behind the scenes” in resort development as well as labor negotiations insofar as those things involved or related to organized crime. The agency suggested he negotiated “sweetheart contracts” with unions representing workers in businesses controlled by organized crime and that those contracts involved illegal payoffs to labor leaders and Korshak’s mob-connected clients in Chicago. This “kickback scheme” may have discouraged unions from organizing occupational groups that management wanted to remain unorganized.¹⁴

None of this was ever proved in a court of law or elsewhere to be true—or false. Korshak did indeed make trips to Las Vegas to meet with owners of the Desert Inn, the Sands, and other resorts with known or suspected connections to organized crime. He brought together investors with such connections to make business deals involving gambling properties in the city, and he represented these investors in negotiations with unions there. But Korshak remained a member of the American Bar Association in good standing throughout the years under study, and several attorneys and business leaders who knew him said he had high ethical standards.¹⁵ In statements to New Jersey gaming authorities in the 1980s, for example, an attorney working for Hilton properties called Korshak “one of the finest human beings I’ve ever met, with a fine reputation in the legal community.” Barron Hilton himself spoke well of the man and suggested he should be “commended rather than chastised for his highly successful career.”¹⁶ Union leaders attributed Korshak’s success as a negotiator to his respect for trade unions and to his casual, informal approach to bargaining. “He’s a hard adversary,” one of them explained, “[but] he doesn’t believe in breaking unions.”¹⁷ To the FBI, Korshak’s presence in Las Vegas hinted of illegal bargaining tactics, but to labor leaders it spoke to the sense of reciprocity that characterized labor relations in the city.

The wages and benefits of union workers in Las Vegas were signs of organized labor’s clout in the city. In the late 1960s, these were as good as or much better than those of their counterparts in the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, where unions tended to be strong and the cost of living high. Housekeepers’ earnings illustrate this point. In 1969 union housekeepers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles earned $12 to $16 a day, while all those in Las Vegas earned $16. Union bartenders in the three larger cities took home $17 to $21 a day in wages while those in Las Vegas made $27. Butchers, fry cooks, sauciers, and other kitchen workers enjoyed similar differentials, as did workers in dining room classifications.¹⁸ The differential was not enough to make low-skilled workers in Las Vegas part of the American middle class, but it did help them own cars, lawn mowers, and home appliances characteristic of at least a lower-middle-class lifestyle. It also enabled some of them to enjoy the outdoor activities associated with camping, travel, and sporting activities.¹⁹

If somewhat exceptional, the economic gains of Las Vegas workers in these years were part of national trends. For more than two decades after World War II, the American economy expanded at an unprecedented pace. Labor shared in this expanding prosperity, and management learned to deal with unions in ways that encouraged industrial peace. Multiyear contracts negotiated through collective bargaining provided pay raises and increasing benefits, which nourished the growth of the unionized workforce. From 1955 to 1968, the real wages of union workers rose by almost 50 percent, by the end of which more union workers than ever had pensions and health insurance, as well as paid vacations, sick leave, and survivor benefits. More workers also belonged to unions. Between 1950 and 1968, the number of union workers in the nation rose by 35 percent, from 14 million to 19 million.²⁰

In the late 1960s, this era of economic growth and industrial peace stalled. Inflation, declining productivity, and rising unemployment became growing problems. Increased foreign competition, rising oil prices, and other troubling developments encouraged employers to rethink labor relations.

These problems had little effect in Las Vegas, the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan area. In the 1960s its population more than doubled, from 130,000 to 275,000, and all sectors of the economy grew accordingly.²¹ The year 1969 was record shattering for the gaming industry. The number of people arriving at McCarran International Airport rose by 15 percent, to more than four million. Gross taxable gaming revenue jumped more than 20 percent; the number of hotel and casino workers increased by more than 10 percent, to about thirty thousand.²²

Yet there were signs by the turn of the decade that this remarkable growth might end. Relevant statewide trends in Nevada were troubling. In the early postwar years, the average earnings of Nevada’s workers rose faster than the national average, and work stoppages were few and short-lived. By the mid-1960s the growth rates of both employment and income were declining, and stoppages became longer and more frequent and involved more workers. The number of workdays lost to strikes reached an all-time high in 1965, when there were thirty-seven strikes in Nevada, most of them involving disputes over wages and benefits.²³

A yearlong strike against cab companies that year exposed the deepening rift between capital and labor in Las Vegas. The Teamsters, which represented the cab drivers, called the strike, charging cab companies with violating contract provisions regulating the number of cabs they could put on the street during holidays. In response, the companies began replacing striking employees, who in turn began harassing strikebreakers. In one unusual incident, strikers pulled a driver out of his cab at knifepoint, drove his vehicle into the desert, and burned it. Las Vegas police arrested a number of strikers involved in physical altercations with strikebreakers.²⁴ As a result of such incidents, a judge banned taxis from certain resorts, which prompted the resorts to organize their own fleet of taxis to shuttle their guests around town. Sidney Korshak tried to pressure both sides to end the strike, but the conflict dragged on. Governor Grant Sawyer eventually intervened in the conflict, but not before one of the struck employers, Checker Cab, declared itself nonunion. There had never been such a long and bitter strike in the city, or one that created such havoc for resorts.²⁵

The election of Republican governor Paul Laxalt in 1966 was another sign of changing times. Laxalt, who defeated the incumbent Governor Grant Sawyer, was no friend of organized labor. As lieutenant governor, he had opposed union efforts to repeal Nevada’s right-to-work law, and in his election campaign made it clear that he favored a “hands off” approach in industrial conflicts. “Government must take care not to involve itself in collective bargaining except in those cases—clear cut cases—when such a dispute is damaging the public interest,” he told an audience of Las Vegas business people during the campaign; “and I don’t mean by that using the term ‘in the public interest’ as an excuse for governmental interference when and where it wants.” He added, “Once the government starts poking its nose like the camel under the tent, no one has immunity.”²⁶ Laxalt was particularly critical of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency that oversaw enforcement of the nation’s labor laws. Like most employers, he believed the board had a “built-in bias” against management. “From the very day it was established in the 1930s,” Laxalt said, “the NLRB has been criticized for its pro-union, anti-business, and anti-public bias. Its failures to do its job in an evenhanded, impartial manner have been documented repeatedly in various congressional investigations.”²⁷

As governor, Laxalt was an ally of corporate resort owners like Howard Hughes and Barron Hilton. Shortly after taking office, he had signed the legislation that made possible large-scale corporate investment in gaming. Hughes and Hilton, who had already shown an interest in gaming, then began their move into Las Vegas. To his supporters, Laxalt cleaned up the city’s image by altering the system of ownership in the industry. To his labor critics, he was a pawn of corporate leaders bent on changing a system of labor-management relations that unions had found responsive to their concerns and to the needs of their members. The old ownership structure in the resort industry had never been a problem for unions. Indeed, it functioned to promote their well-being and the well-being of their members.²⁸

The first big strike in the resort industry occurred soon after Laxalt took office. In March 1967, after concluding negotiations with major Strip properties, the Culinary and Bartenders turned their attention to twelve downtown gambling establishments which bargained through the Downtown Casino Association (DCA). Though these properties were smaller and less profitable than their counterparts on the Strip, they nonetheless agreed to match the terms and conditions of the new agreements governing Strip resorts, which provided annual wage increases of 6 percent, boosted employer contributions to union health and welfare funds, provided guaranteed workweeks, and improved holiday and vacation benefits. Bramlet, however, insisted the properties pay food servers higher wages than those paid on the Strip because their recent reductions in the prices of meals and drinks had reduced their employees’ tips. The “crux” of the problem, as Bramlet put it, was the recent introduction of “49-cent breakfasts, giveaway drinks, and cut-rate meal prices.”²⁹

The DCA rejected Bramlet’s proposal. Members of the association insisted that they could not afford to pay higher wages than their competitors on the Strip. Whoever heard of companies establishing wage rates based on the tips that employees at other companies received, they asked. “If you work for any of the four auto companies,” Frank Mooney of the Fremont Hotel explained to the press, “you get the same wages; tips have nothing to do with it.”³⁰

The Culinary and Bartenders remained firm, however, and called for a strike to accomplish their goals. On the evening of April 18, when their contracts with the properties expired, eight hundred members of the unions at the offending properties walked off their jobs. Another twelve hundred failed to report for work when their shifts began the next day. Employers responded by closing their dining facilities and staffing bars and hotel operations with supervisory employees. They also announced they would discharge dealers and other nonunion employees who honored picket lines. “We are prepared to withstand this strike if it takes all summer,” DCA president Don Ashworth said.³¹

The work stoppage transformed the downtown area into a cavalcade of activities. Picketers marched around the properties day and night, singing songs of protest and chanting slogans like: “One, two, three, four, don’t go near that open door!” Scores of workers from other unions refused to cross union picket lines and roamed the downtown area just to see and hear the pickets. Police officers were everywhere, as were news reporters and television camera crews. To get something to eat in the area, people stood in long lines outside coffee shops and restaurants like Denny’s and Mon Woo’s Café. As an employee at one of those places explained, people ordered food “faster than we can get the stuff off the griddle.”³²

The strike lasted six days. As soon it began, some DCA members expressed a willingness to meet union demands. A few showed genuine concern for the plight of their striking employees. Benny Binion, who owned the Horseshoe, provided meals to picketers outside his property. Italo Ghelfi of the Golden Nugget offered picketers cold drinks and cigarettes. The lack of unity within the DCA combined with labor solidarity to undermine management’s bargaining position. The downtown employers ultimately agreed to pay their food and beverage servers about 4 percent more than they could earn on the Strip. They tried to downplay their concessions in the press. “It wasn’t as bad as we thought,” Frank Mooney of the Fremont said of the strike. “We could have survived the strike had it lasted longer.” Billy Parker of the California Club agreed. “I think all the publicity we got in the Los Angeles newspapers actually helped; a lot of people came up out of curiosity.” Culinary leader Al Bramlet offered a more candid assessment of the strike. The settlement that ended it, he said, “includes all the provisions of the Strip contract signed last month, including all adjustments of wage inequities.”³³

The 1967 work stoppage was neither particularly bitter nor costly, but it warned employers that traditional ways of dealing with resort workers and their unions were now problematical. Times had changed. The prospect of publicly traded corporations investing in gaming promised to transform the industry. Tourism as an industry had grown and was becoming more competitive. Neither the personalized practices and customs of a Roy Flippin nor the subterranean services of syndicate “fixers” like Sidney Korshak could survive in the new circumstances. Industrial relations must be rationalized, subject to calculations of profitability, cost effectiveness, and efficiency. In terms of the workplace, this likely meant growing impersonalization and increased reliance on written rules and regulations—in a word, bureaucratization. The challenge this presented to unions was to humanize the transformation as best they could and to see after the material interests and social well-being of their members.

Corporate executives who worked for Howard Hughes in Las Vegas understood the nature of the transformation taking place. When Hughes purchased the Desert Inn in 1967, his chief aids expressed dismay at the absence of personnel offices in the resorts they were buying and the absence of such elementary management tools as usable personnel records. They wondered why no one was designated to oversee such basic areas of management as restaurant and food operations. They were equally surprised at the casual way in which the Nevada Industrial Council dealt with unions. To make Hughes’s properties competitive and profitable, they set about enlisting other industrial leaders in an effort to create a new, stronger organization to deal with unions.³⁴

The organization they would use for their purposes, the Nevada Resort Association (NRA), already existed. The brainchild of George Ullom, a onetime member of the Gaming Control Board, the NRA was the result of Ullom’s effort to get resort owners to work together to understand how they could use Nevada’s gaming laws and tax policies for their own advantage, and how they could work together to improve the images of the city and of its gaming industry. In 1961, at Ullom’s initiative, representatives from nine resorts created the association, paid membership dues based on the number of hotel rooms in their properties, and solicited membership from other resort owners and managers. The original organizers appointed Ullom executive director, in which role he helped NRA members understand their interests and how to protect and expand them. Among other things, he helped members identify political candidates who might advance their interests politically.³⁵ But the association did not initially concern itself with matters involving collective bargaining or unions. “I would not handle any labor relations,” Ullom explained. “That would be outside of the sphere of the [association’s] activities.”³⁶

The NRA remained a relatively loose-knit organization adhering to its original purposes until 1966, when Robbins Cahill became its managing director. The appointment of Cahill, a respected former state assemblyman, state tax commissioner, and state Gaming Control Board chairman, no doubt improved public perceptions of the association and of the gaming industry it fronted for.³⁷ Cahill had been public spokesman for the association since the early 1960s and in that role helped keep industry leaders abreast of legislation and political trends affecting gaming. In these years, the organization increased the scope of its lobbying and public relations activities but steered clear of labor-management relations. Cahill spent much of his first year as director understanding the implications of the proposed corporate gaming act and helping resort managers prepare for its implementation. Working through Cahill and their attorneys, NRA members also sought to shape the language of the act to protect their interests.³⁸

In 1968 management representatives from sixteen major Strip resorts joined together to transform the NRA by making it responsible for negotiating their labor contracts. This changed the basic nature and purpose of the association. Unlike the Industrial Council, which fell by the wayside, the NRA required the agreement of two-thirds of its members on the positions it took in industry-wide bargaining, and members agreed to pay fines to the association of up to $500,000 for breaking rank in negotiating contracts. The NRA executive board set the management agenda for collective bargaining and hired William Campbell as chief negotiator. Campbell was skilled, experienced, and widely respected by both resort owners and union leaders. He had previously represented the Federation Employers’ Association, a sizable group of restaurateurs, launderette owners, and other local employers in labor negotiations, and knew many of the city’s business, labor, and civic leaders. He had the confidence of Robbins Cahill, who thought hiring Campbell “the smartest thing” the NRA ever did. “The man is tremendously capable,” Cahill remarked. “He knows the business backward and forwards.”³⁹

Campbell approached collective bargaining professionally. He collected detailed information on wages, working conditions, and job benefits in other tourist destinations and asked members to identify their problems, concerns, and expectations. He helped them prepare for work stoppages and taught them how to calculate their losses at any point in a strike. He also had them prepare plans to help individual resorts that became targets of “selective” strikes aimed at undermining the association through isolate-and-conquer techniques, which unions used on occasion to win concessions from multiemployer bargaining groups. When unions struck one or more but not all NRA properties, he reminded the group, the others had the option to lockout members of those unions while the strike lasted. Hiring so skilled and resourceful a strategist as Campbell changed the milieu of collective bargaining. The unions now faced a more united employer association ready to resist whatever it considered as excessive union demands.⁴⁰

This transformation brought employers in Las Vegas in line with employers in other industries across the nation. That is, resort owners had come to believe that the unions they confronted had become strong enough to jeopardize the profitability and growth—that is, the future—of the industry. Cahill himself shared this view, which was no doubt one reason the NRA made him managing director. “To put it very boldly,” he said in the early 1970s, “I think that labor has the hotels of Las Vegas by the throat. I think [union leaders] have got them by the jugular vein, and they know it.” “That may sound like an anti-labor argument,” he added, “but basically … it’s an analysis of conditions as they are.”⁴¹ These words signaled a new era in collective bargaining in the industry Cahill represented.

That era dawned in 1969, when the contracts of “front-end” members of the Teamsters and Operating Engineers unions expired in Strip resorts. These unions were small, and one of them was a newcomer to the industry. The Teamsters had only recently chartered Local 995 to represent its resort workers, which included desk and registration clerks and switchboard operators as well as warehousemen, window cleaners, and receiving and dispatching clerks, who together in 1969 totaled more than 1,200 members. The Operating Engineers, a much smaller organization of mechanics and engineers, had gained a foothold in the resort industry in the 1950s, after a merger of engineers’ unions in California and Nevada. Its 350 members installed and maintained power equipment in the resorts.⁴²

In negotiations with the NRA, the unions proposed new three-year agreements boosting wages about 10 percent annually and creating new employer-funded retirement plans. These proposals they presented as justified by recent and still-rising increases in the cost of living. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had recently reported that the price of meat, poultry, and fish had jumped nearly 5 percent in the month of May alone and that food prices generally had risen nearly 2 percent. A dollar in 1969 bought what seventy-eight cents had a decade earlier. The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority had recently acknowledged the impact of inflation by approving sizable pay hikes for its employees. The NRA nonetheless rejected the proposed wage increases as “excessive” and “unreasonable,” and the union contracts expired.⁴³

In response, the two unions pulled telephone operators, desk clerks, and engineers off the job at the Dunes Hotel, one of the Howard Hughes properties represented by the NRA. This selective strike, union leaders hoped, would encourage the Dunes to accept their wage and benefit proposals, thus giving the other properties little choice but to follow suit. Almost immediately, however, the resorts represented by the NRA locked out members of the Teamsters and the Operating Engineers, vowing to keep their properties open by staffing desks and switchboards with nonunion supervisors and managers. When the Central Labor Council sanctioned the strike, however, hundreds of employees from other unions refused to cross picket lines set up by teamsters and engineers at the Dunes. This prompted employers to agree the next day to the union demands to raise wages by nearly 30 percent over three years and to increase substantially retirement and fringe benefits. Not surprisingly, union leaders saw the strike as a clear victory for labor.⁴⁴

The strike, however, revealed a heightened sense of animosity and distrust in the bargaining environment. Union leaders insisted that Howard Hughes controlled the NRA and was out “to break” the unions in the resorts. Hughes and other entrepreneurs were unconcerned about the well-being of their employees, they charged. In response, employers painted union leaders as selfish schemers with little interest in the future of tourism. “It is painfully obvious that the Teamsters and Operating Engineers, working with the Central Labor Council, are making a concerted effort to wring an extravagant settlement out of the resort industry,” William Campbell told reporters when the strike began. “This is being attempted without regard to the serious impact on the area’s economy [and] the continued well-being of an industry which provides 20,000 jobs for union members in Southern Nevada.”⁴⁵ Such hyperbole reflected the growing divide between labor and management.

This acrimonious state of affairs became more obvious the following year, when the contracts of the 15,000 members of the Culinary and Bartenders unions expired. In an effort to avoid another costly defeat, the NRA members, in the words of Robbins Cahill, approached negotiations in 1970 “in a different way than they ever had before.” The association’s members formed a “protective agreement,” as Cahill later recalled. “They agreed that they’d all stick together, and that they wouldn’t let [the unions] strike in one or two or three places and the rest stay open and take advantage of it, that it was a common cause, and that it was a life or death struggle.”⁴⁶ The employers formed their negotiating committee “on a professional basis.” That is, the committee consisted of salaried managers and experts rather than owners, and it had full power to negotiate on the association’s behalf. Committee members were “not the bosses,” as Cahill put it, but “working supervisors who knew the problems.”⁴⁷ Campbell alone spoke for the NRA at the bargaining table. Committee members who wanted to shape the bargaining process did so before the bargaining began, or between bargaining sessions.

As soon as the negotiations began, the NRA rejected the unions’ wage and benefit proposals. Union leaders no doubt expected that. Their proposals would not only boost wages more than 35 percent over three years but increase benefits, which, with the wage increases, would raise labor costs nearly 45 percent. They justified the demands on the grounds of inflation, which in their calculations had raised the cost of living 16 percent since 1967, wiping out gains workers had made in earlier contracts. And prices were still rising. The NRA did not deny those calculations but insisted that the resort industry had grown too competitive and profit margins too small to meet the unions’ demands. Employers could no longer pass ever-increasing labor costs to consumers and continue to grow the industry. Market conditions had changed; new conditions demanded that employers control labor as well as other costs. Campbell offered to boost wages 18 percent over three years for tipped employees and 21 to 27 percent for others. The issue of benefits, he said, would have to wait until the parties agreed on wages.⁴⁸

More important for the future of the unions than the specifics of wage increases was Campbell’s insistence on eliminating one of the unions’ most powerful weapons—the right of members to honor picket lines of other unions. That right had determined the outcome of the Teamsters and Operating Engineers strike a year earlier. It was also a major weapon in efforts to organize still unorganized workers, such as dealers and security guards. When any group professing to represent unorganized workers threw up informational picket lines at resorts, union workers could refuse to cross them without fear of being discharged or otherwise disciplined. In other words, contracts had traditionally given union workers the freedom to withhold their services in a variety of circumstances, including disputes involving employers and any of their employees. Employers now insisted on eliminating that language.⁴⁹

Union leaders looked upon that insistence as an attack on a basic pillar of union strength and rejected it. “We will not change a provision that has been in the contract for twenty years,” Culinary leader Al Bramlet told the press. “This is strictly a move by employers, not just to weaken, but to completely destroy the Southern Nevada labor movement. We will not be a party to it.” “They are asking us to sell out every other labor organization in Nevada,” Bramlet added, “which we won’t do.”⁵⁰

On March 9, the day before contracts expired, Bramlet brought management’s “final” offer before members of his own union and the Bartenders. The offer included wage and benefit increases that boosted labor costs by 25 percent over three years but eliminated the right to wage sympathy strikes. Addressing union members at a jammed convention center, Bramlet recommended rejecting the offer and authorizing a strike. A strike, he warned, could be long and difficult. “Don’t any of you get the impression that this is a lark and that we’re going out on strike for a few hours,” Bramlet told the crowd.⁵¹ The rank and file followed Bramlet’s advice, voting overwhelmingly to reject management’s offer and give union leaders authority to call a strike.

Though Bramlet promised to “hit them all at once,” he targeted three NRA establishments—the Desert Inn, the International, and Caesars Palace. His choice was calculated. Each of the three was part of a corporate structure easy to vilify. The Desert Inn was one of the properties of Hughes, who had recently left Las Vegas to reside in the Bahamas. Kirk Kerkorian, who controlled the International, was more visible to workers than Hughes, but he too seemed like a distant overlord. Caesars Palace had recently been purchased by a Florida-based company chiefly involved in owning and/or operating large restaurant and retail chains nationwide. Workers perceived a growing gap between themselves and their employers in such distant places.⁵²

The NRA responded to the selective strike by locking out culinary workers and bartenders and shutting down all of its properties. The association had little choice in the latter action, because almost all union workers refused to cross picket lines. Cab drivers supported the strike by refusing to drive passengers onto struck properties. Construction workers shut down expansion and renovation projects. Campbell acknowledged this massive show of solidarity. “Employees represented by all other unions,” Campbell told officials, “respected the picket lines and did not report for work.”⁵³ This unity impressed even union leaders. “For the first time many of us can remember,” Bramlet told the press, “organized labor in southern Nevada is really working as a team.” The solidarity showed to him the importance of workers’ rights to honor picket lines. “We think basic unionism is at stake.” The NRA disagreed. What was at stake, its spokesmen told the press, were the rights of management to the services of the workers it hired.⁵⁴

The strike and lockout disrupted tourism, catching tourists by surprise. Many of those at closed resorts found rooms at motels on or near the Strip or downtown, or at one of the independent resorts still open, such as the Riviera and Circus Circus. Others left Las Vegas as soon as they could in the chaos caused by the absence of workers at checkout counters, parking lots, transport facilities, and the like. Though some tourists took the chaos in stride, others were angry or disappointed. “We are disgusted,” one of them said.⁵⁵

The strike and lockout also disrupted business in and around Las Vegas, soon forcing layoffs or wage cuts at places directly dependent on tourism. Companies that provided goods and services to resorts were immediately hard hit. The Nevada Dice Company, to illustrate, which made casino dice, lost 90 percent of its business as soon as the strike and lockout began, about $500 a day, a major loss for a small enterprise. If the strike lasted more than a week, the company manager told the press, he would close down his operation. New York Bagel Boys, a small firm that supplied Strip properties with kosher-style bakery goods, saw its orders decline 50 percent. And so it went with similar enterprises.⁵⁶

When the strike began, Governor Laxalt, who had vowed to stay out of labor disputes, warned the public to prepare for a long and costly work stoppage. “We are in the midst of what could be the most severe economic strike in Nevada’s history,” he said, urging both parties to settle their differences for the sake of the community and the industry, as well as themselves. “I hope that both sides address themselves to the merits of this controversy with a firm resolve to settle as quickly as possible. If this does not occur the effects of this strike may be felt in southern Nevada for many years to come.”⁵⁷ The governor could intervene in the strike only if one or both of the parties asked him to do so.

Continuation of the strike soon prompted elected officials to call for its end. Senator Howard Cannon, for example, urged parties to reach an agreement “without delay.” “The present stalemate in negotiations serves no one,” the senator said. “It brings hardship and privation to thousands of working men and women and their families.”⁵⁸ Clark County district attorney George Franklin wrote personal letters to both Bramlet and Campbell reminding them that continuing the strike could result in the cancellation of upcoming conventions. “We are now the number one convention city in the world,” Franklin pointed out. “If a number of long-committed conventions are cancelled or not serviced, it could have long range effects on our convention business many years after the current negotiations are mutually concluded.”⁵⁹

Political pressure soon combined with plunging profits to produce a breakthrough. On March 13, three days after the strike began, nine resorts agreed to drop their demands for language prohibiting employees from honoring picket lines of other union employees if the unions accepted contract language that required workers to cross lines set up for informational or organizational purposes. Such language would make it difficult for unions to organize dealers and security guards and was something the unions had always adamantly opposed.⁶⁰

The following day, in the office of Hank Greenspun, editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, the parties hammered out an agreement that gave the unions most of what they wanted in terms of pay and benefits. These amounted to about a 32 percent increase over the life of the contract and included generous increases in benefits. But, in return, Bramlet agreed that members of the Culinary and Bartenders no longer had the right to honor picket lines set up for informational or organizational purposes. Because Bramlet now viewed dealers as beyond the reach of his union, he conceded this point in return for a generous economic settlement. That would prove to be a momentous concession.⁶¹

After this bargaining session ended, both parties expressed satisfaction with the settlement. “It was a good settlement for both sides,” Alex Shoofey of the International said. “We think a satisfactory agreement has been reached.”⁶² Al Benedict of the Hughes properties agreed. “I think an equitable settlement was worked out for both labor and management,” he said. “I think we can live in harmony for the remainder of the three-year contract.”⁶³ Bramlet was publicly silent about his compromise on crossing picket lines but said culinary workers and bartenders should be pleased with the new contract. “Both unions are happy with the contract in its final form,” he said. “We believe it is a realistic increase in both wages and conditions in light of today’s cost of living.” Bramlet added, “We express our deepest thanks to all the other unions who gave their full support. … Their actions demonstrated the unity of the labor movement in southern Nevada.”⁶⁴ The balance of power between management and labor had shifted, as the new contract language on crossing organizational and informational picket lines presaged, but had not yet shifted as significantly as the NRA was determined that it would.

The first strikes against the Las Vegas resort industry reflected the fact that a relatively relaxed world of labor relations was giving way to one of confrontation. By the 1970s this transition was well underway. The new corporate owners tended to be distant figures who delegated management tasks to little-known executives, who in turn assigned the job of dealing with unions to professional staffers, who, in streamlining and rationalizing it, diminished the human element it once boasted. Dick Thomas of the Teamsters complained that the corporate change made the process “much more difficult,” and “much more time consuming.” Instead of dealing with the owners, Thomas and other bargainers now dealt with what they called “labor relations persons” and “bean counters.” “Their whole concept of negotiations was entirely different.” “They were looking and wanting to make a profit out of every piece of the hotel business.”⁶⁵

The postwar consensus that had stabilized Las Vegas labor relations had begun to unravel, though there had been no mass arrests or violence during the first strikes. Indeed, when the 1970 conflict ended, both labor and management praised the “cooperative and courteous” handling of the incident by law-enforcement officials. “We appreciate the cooperation of the sheriff’s office in the strike,” Bramlet told reporters after the conflict. “Their officers certainly demonstrated absolute impartiality and in some instances were helpful in controlling traffic in and out of the hotels so union members would not be injured.” Al Benedict similarly praised picketing workers for their orderliness. “We’re proud of the way the pickets conducted themselves,” the resort manager told the press. “We don’t like to see picket lines, but we feel they were handled in a discreet manner in the recent strike.”⁶⁶ Industrial relations had become adversarial, and employers had won some small restrictions on the right of workers to join sympathy strikes. But they had not yet demanded cuts in wages or benefits, or the elimination of work rules valued by workers. Those things were yet to come.