5. Workplace Incidents

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

No 5
Workplace Incidents

On July 14, 1970, the Frontier Hotel fired Herman Buskin, an experienced warehouse worker, for “willful misconduct” and making “rash and inflammatory” statements to his overseer, the warehouse manager. Buskin had objected to new workplace rules, and when his supervisor insisted on enforcing the new rules, Buskin called him a “dirty bastard” and a “son-of-a-bitch.” More important, he told a co-worker he intended “to kill” the supervisor. What provoked Buskin was the fact that the new rules relegated him to a new workstation and to more onerous tasks and responsibilities. The hotel considered Buskin’s reaction in this encounter with his supervisor to constitute “gross disrespect toward supervision” and an “attack [on] principles of authority.” On this basis, it dismissed him summarily. Buskin appealed the dismissal through the grievance procedure provided in his union contract. When the Frontier refused a plea to reinstate Buskin, his union thought his appeal weighty enough to take it to arbitration, only to have the arbitrator rule against him. Buskin’s conduct, the arbitrator found, “could only be considered as destructive of good labor management relations.”¹

The workings of this arbitration process reveal a good deal about workers and labor relations in the resort industry. To begin with, it shows something of the workplace experience, including the problems and pressures generated therein. Resort workers in Las Vegas shared the gamut of attitudes and perspectives that characterized American workplaces generally, with special concerns that grew out of the specific nature of their work. The records generated by the arbitration process shed light on their attitudes toward work and labor relations, and on how they justified their workplace behavior and understood their social being as workers. They show that resort workers were generally cooperative and earnest but had a strong sense of self-worth and even entitlement.²

The arbitration process also shows how resort managers exercised and maintained the “right to manage.” Managers always resisted grievance processes, viewing them as intrusions into their control of the workplace. In the Las Vegas resort industry, however, a union-backed grievance system was well ensconced by 1955, and managers had learned to work through rather than against the system to maintain their prerogatives. To a meaningful degree, they were able to use arbitration to improve the efficiency and productivity of workers and to ensure that workers and unions abided by management decisions. This was especially true after corporate managers took control of the industry in the late 1960s and the 1970s.³

Moreover, arbitration cases show that workers and their supervisors confronted one another at different levels and in different ways. Some encounters between labor and management were much more confrontational than others. Many took place in full view of everyone in the workplace, often including customers, and most revolved around unspectacular infractions of house rules and regulations. Though employers viewed their workplace policies as essential to the orderly functioning of their business operations, their house rules were not so much rooted in the natural order of things as in their understandings of what constituted workplace orderliness. Probably most workers considered some number of those rules as variously unnecessary, arbitrary, or even demeaning and ignored or circumvented them as best they could.

The origins of labor arbitration lay in federal statutes and court rulings as well as collective bargaining agreements. The Wagner Act of 1935 created the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to oversee the execution of federal responsibility in workplace relations, which the act itself spelled out. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1948 modified and institutionalized the system thus created, and declared arbitration the “most desirable” method of settling bargaining and workplace disputes and enforcing labor contracts. It also empowered the federal government to arbitrate labor disputes that threatened to disrupt interstate commerce. In a series of rulings over the years, the Supreme Court found that arbitration had a therapeutic effect on labor relations, functioning to reduce tensions and conflict and to reward compromise and responsible behavior on both sides. The Court’s findings rested in no small degree on the willingness of arbitrators to weigh evidence and rule impartially within the parameters of relevant law and bargaining agreements.⁴

The selection of arbitrators was therefore contested. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which Taft-Hartley created, helped unions and employers establish and maintain panels of mutually acceptable arbitrators. In the Las Vegas resort industry, both parties worked assiduously to find sympathetic arbitrators, that is, those they thought could be swayed by reasonable evidence supporting their side. They then agreed on a panel of about a dozen individuals from which the two sides agreed on an arbitrator for each grievance procedure that reached the stage of formal arbitration. The two sides retained the right to strike names from the slate annually. In the resulting modifications, each side sought to retain members sympathetic to its views and replace those it considered hostile.⁵

Arbitrators handled only a minuscule fraction of grievances filed in any given year and industry. Labor and management settled most grievances informally, often over the telephone. When this was impossible, they referred the grievance to their own representatives, and only if those representatives failed to achieve a mutually agreeable resolution of the dispute, or if both parties waived this step, did the grievance go to an arbitrator, whose decision was final and binding. Both sides had reason to settle disputes informally. Arbitration was slow and costly, attorneys and arbitrators had to be paid, and the outcome of arbitration cases was always uncertain.

In deciding cases, arbitrators applied criteria of “just cause” to the actions of employees and employers. Labor contracts recognized employers’ rights to discipline or discharge employees for specified causes. Unions acknowledged that workers could be dismissed or disciplined for flouting or ignoring legitimate supervisory authority or breaking house rules about which they had been informed. Except in the most flagrant cases, unions insisted that employers provide “progressive discipline.” They expected employers to give offending employees written warnings and verbal admonitions for first or even second offenses, thus creating a written record of employee misconduct. Contracts often made three written warnings within a few months or a year sufficient grounds for suspension or discharge, depending on the nature of the offenses and the circumstances of the incidents. They also stipulated that grievances be filed within a specified time, usually a week or two following the discipline.⁶

This system of grievance resolution was well established in the Las Vegas resort industry. The 1957 agreement between the Culinary and the Nevada Industrial Council, for example, set up a three-step process for handling disputes in the workplace and the meaning of contract language, and that process continued through the period of this study.⁷ Using this process, workers filed several hundred written complaints each year in the 1960s alleging mistreatment in the workplace. The grievance rate and the number of grievances that went to arbitration rose notably in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which suggests that labor, management, or both thought that the informal working of collective bargaining processes was functioning less effectively than it had in the past or that workplace relations had become more contentious. Still, the number of grievances filed is not by itself an accurate barometer of labor relations. The resort industry and its workforce grew rapidly, as did the bureaucratization and hence the depersonalization of workplace relations, and perhaps also the stressfulness of work and of worker-supervisor relations at the lowest levels. Each and all of these things might explain the rise in grievances filed and the increasing difficulty unions had in getting managers to abide by union understandings of the language of their contracts.⁸

A study of grievances filed in the Culinary in the 1970s and 1980s details the general trend. In the 1970s, when the Culinary had more than twenty thousand members in the metropolitan area, its members filed 1,500 to 2,000 grievances annually. In the following decade, when the Culinary’s membership grew to more than thirty thousand, its members filed 2,200 to 3,000 grievances a year. In the 1970s and 1980s inclusive, the number of their grievances totaled more than 40,000. Of those, fewer than 350—less than 1 percent—went to arbitration, and more than two-thirds of these involved suspension or discharge of the employee. The union won about 65 percent of the cases formally arbitrated, which not only suggested that most arbitrated grievances were reasonable and justified but that union expenditure on arbitration was a good investment.⁹

Women and minorities were as likely to file grievances as white male employees, but neither they nor union officials targeted problems of gender or racial discrimination for arbitration. Unions established grievance machinery to resolve violations of labor contracts, and not until the 1970s did those contracts include language to address the problem of discrimination other than provisions that insisted on equal pay for men and women. Even then, they prohibited parties from denying employment only on the basis of race, sex, or national origins. Resort workers thus found other ways of fighting discrimination. Beginning in 1964, some filed complaints with the newly established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which investigated discriminatory practices in society and encouraged the U.S. Justice Department to enforce civil rights laws. Others took their problems to the Nevada Equal Rights Commission, which also investigated charges of workplace discrimination and pushed to enforce the law. Still others alerted the local branch of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) of workplace problems. When it came to breaking down patterns of discrimination in resorts (as illustrated in the next chapter), grass-roots movements led by civil rights activists proved far more effective than the union resolution procedures. The problem of race and gender discrimination was common to both unions and management, as well as the larger society.

A representative grievance that went to an arbitrator in the early years of this study involved the discharge of bartender John Filizzola by the Thunderbird Hotel. Like other resort bartenders, Filizzola took orders from customers and cocktail waitresses, received payments, and recorded sales according to specified procedures, including procedures for rectifying his own mistakes. At the end of his shift, he counted his receipts and reconciled them with the cash register tape. He placed the receipts and the tape in a “cash envelope,” which he turned over to management.¹⁰

The hotel fired Filizzola in September 1966 for violating regulations governing the handling of receipts and money. An undercover detective reported that he saw Filizzola serve drinks without ringing up sales and stuffing money into his pocket. Confronted with the report, Filizzola, who had worked at the hotel for three months, denied the charges and contacted his union for help. The union investigated the case and filed a grievance on Filizzola’s behalf. The union concluded that whether Filizzola had actually stolen money was unclear; what was clear was that the hotel had not shown just cause for discharging him. Informal discussion failed to resolve the grievance, and the two sides agreed to submit the case to arbitrator Howard Duram. Duram heard the evidence and arguments, including the detective’s reports and Filizzola’s denial of the charges, in January 1967, four months after Filizzola’s dismissal. Cocktail waitresses, Filizzola explained, sometimes made mistakes serving drinks, which forced him to prepare new drinks without ringing up sales, and he sometimes received cash tips from hotel guests who charged drinks, and put the money either in a glass on the bar or in his pocket. The money the detective saw him pocket, he insisted, was his own.¹¹

Two months later, Duram ruled against the hotel. Filizzola’s discharge, he found, violated the hotel’s collective bargaining agreement with the Bartenders Union, which like state and federal laws required the employer to support accusations of theft beyond a reasonable doubt. The hotel had not done that, Duram found, having made no effort to document the validity of the detective’s report. Although the bartender had worked at the Thunderbird for only three months, he had an unblemished employment record elsewhere of ten years. The money Filizzola put in his pocket could have been his own. The arbitrator thus ordered the Thunderbird to reinstate Filizzola with back pay.¹²

The Filizzola case showed the assiduity with which management oversaw and disciplined employees who handled money. The hiring of detectives for surveillance purposes was common and was just one of several ways employers let employees know they monitored their behavior. The case also indicated the limits of managerial authority. Union contracts placed meaningful restrictions on the rights of employers to discharge employees, restrictions that were procedural as well as substantive and applied even to employees suspected of thievery or incompetence. Whether Filizzola was guilty or innocent is moot, but in dismissing him the hotel had been procedurally amiss. If contractual niceties sometimes allowed dishonest barkeepers to keep their jobs, the knowledge that management monitored their behavior no doubt made bartenders careful of their conduct. Contractual language provided protection to employees against arbitrary employers and supervisors, and emboldened workers like Filizzola to resist what they considered managerial arbitrariness. A system that might occasionally reward a thieving employee benefited other employees wrongfully accused of misconduct.

A 1968 grievance involving female switchboard operators at the Frontier Hotel further demonstrates the nature of workplace relations and the value of the arbitration system for workers. The case documents an instance of solidarity as well as impulsiveness not normally associated with service workers and says something about how workers dealt with the failure of their union to address their problems. In May of that year, six switchboard operators walked off their jobs without warning to protest their treatment by their supervisor, Chief Operator Irene Cooper. Cooper, they charged, frequently insulted and ridiculed them, engaged in favoritism in assigning work shifts, and meted out punishment unfairly and unevenly, and on the basis of personal likes and dislikes. “The abuse and mistreatment that I have seen the girls subjected to,” one of the operators later explained, “is so upsetting that it affects everyone in the office.”¹³

The women had tried to resolve their problems with Cooper. Two days before the walkout, one of them told a hotel assistant manager that the operators were “having trouble” with Cooper and thinking of walking off their jobs. The manager promised to “check into the situation” and “get back to” the complainant, but failed to do so. One of the women told her union, the Teamsters, on the morning of the walkout that operators were about to strike. A union spokesman advised her to “hold everything” and dispatched a representative to discuss the matter with the hotel’s personnel director. As this occurred, fourteen operators signed a complaint against Cooper, and another sent a handwritten note to the union saying of Cooper: “We will not go for anything less than to have her out.” By one o’clock, six of the operators concluded that neither management nor the union was doing anything to help them and walked off the job. The hotel responded by calling in off-duty operators and discharging the disgruntled operators on grounds that their actions violated contract language prohibiting “wildcat” strikes.¹⁴

The Teamsters never condoned such strikes but thought the discharges in this case precipitate and unwarranted. It therefore filed a grievance on behalf of the discharged operators, arguing that extenuating circumstances justified their walkout and asking for their reinstatement. The hotel refused, viewing the walkout as a calculated challenge to management prerogative. By mutual agreement, the two parties sent the case to arbitration.

Two months later arbitrator Oran Gragson, who was also mayor of Las Vegas, ruled that the walkout did indeed violate the collective bargaining agreement. The protesting operators, Gragson explained, should have used established procedures to address their grievances before walking out. To sanction the walkout, he said, “would create a condition that would be intolerable to the employer and would greatly diminish the effectiveness of grievance procedures established in the collective bargaining contract.”¹⁵ The dismissal of the operators was thus justified.

This grievance showed how workers demanded some degree of respect and fairness from their supervisors. In detailing this incident, the switchboard operators insisted that supervisors had a responsibility to cultivate a pleasant work environment and treat employees equitably. “It’s up to the chief operator to determine the atmosphere in an office,” one of the women explained. “When she’s raving at a girl for nothing it’s pretty hard to maintain a pleasant atmosphere.” Employees could be disciplined, she acknowledged, but it should be done discreetly, and without embarrassing them. “[She] makes girls cry the way she talks to them,” one operator said of Cooper. “She should have quietly done her reprimanding and not gloated about it,” another explained. Such comments suggest that workers expected a good supervisor to acknowledge their value and care about their well-being as well as their work. “Mrs. Cooper hasn’t appreciated me in any way,” one of operators said. “[She] does not show any understanding or compassion for her girls.” The women thus let management know that a supervisor like Cooper jeopardized the success of the hotel. Cooper had driven “loyal” employees off the job and made it difficult for those who remained to treat hotel guests hospitably. “We are salesmen for the Hotel,” as one of the women put it, “and [we] have to feel what we are trying to transmit to the public.”¹⁶

These cases involving the Thunderbird and the Frontier underscore the importance of unions and grievance procedures in resort workers’ lives. They show that the grievance process helped workers assert their contractual rights and protect their jobs, thus giving them a voice in decisions that affected their lives. Yet they also demonstrated how employers could use the process to exercise their own prerogatives in the workplace. Like unions, resorts could insist on including new management rights in collective bargaining agreements, and those rights helped win arbitration cases. They could also delay the resolution of workplace disputes and sap unions of energy and funds. Resort workers understood the problems and uncertainties associated with grievance procedures, and that knowledge no doubt discouraged some of them from filing grievances. In the late 1960s and 1970s, however, for which there are substantial records, thousands of workers appealed to their unions for help in resolving their problems.

Many grievances concerned small matters of employee insubordination, which employers were generally unwilling to tolerate. Collective bargaining agreements in the resort industry recognized management’s right to “direct, plan and control” the workforce as long as doing so was consistent with specifications written into the contracts. They also permitted the summary discharge of employees for “willful misconduct” but not for “insubordination.” Unions made a sharp distinction between these two forms of misbehavior, insisting that the “just cause” doctrine required management to prove more than insubordination to justify a summary discharge.

A representative instance of this involved the 1970 discharge of Noel Durant, a waiter in the Copa Room at the Sands Hotel, the most famous showroom in Las Vegas. One or more of the “Rat Pack”—Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford—appeared there regularly, as did Milton Berle, Nat “King” Cole, and Danny Thomas. The room often filled with celebrities and well-known socialites, and working there was understandably stressful. With two shows nightly, waiters like Durant had to work quickly and efficiently.

Durant’s work routine began about 6:30 p.m., when the doors opened for the 8:00 p.m. dinner show. As guests entered, hosts or hostesses seated them, and, in teams, waitresses took their orders and gave them to waiters at assigned stations. The waiters recorded the orders and carried them to the executive chef, Maurice Cau, who used an intercom to call them in to assistant chefs and cooks. Because showroom meals were partially prepared in advance, the chefs and cooks filled orders rapidly. They placed the filled orders at the waiters’ window, from which the waiters took them to waitresses who served them. After the meal, waitresses cleared the tables. This process began again at 9:30 p.m., when guests for the second show began arriving.¹⁷

Durant, who had worked at the Copa for two years, had had no problems with his work. On August 7, however, he submitted a customer’s order to the executive chef on the yellow slip of paper the hotel reserved for room service orders rather than on the white one used for showroom customers. The chef told Durant of his mistake and cautioned him not to repeat it. When Durant did just that, the chef threw the order back at him and refused to fill it. Durant protested, whereupon the chef in a loud voice called Durant, an Englishman, a “limey,” at which Durant took offense. “Fuck you,” Durant said in return. The chef then banished Durant from the kitchen, informing his supervisor, the maitre d’, of the banishment.

At that point, the captain of the room interceded in the dispute, admonishing Durant not to “talk back” to the chef, to which the waiter replied loudly, “The chef can go fuck himself!” Everyone in the kitchen, including the chef, heard the reply, but Durant rewrote the order on white paper and finished his shift without further incident. When he returned to work the next day, he learned that the chef had banished him from the kitchen. The banishment did not prevent Durant from doing his work, and for the next two nights he worked his shift as usual. The director of food and beverage services at the hotel, who had by then concluded that the situation was intolerable, decided to fire the waiter. When Durant reported for work the next day, a security guard at the employee’s entrance handed him a termination notice. He was discharged, the note said, for “willful misconduct.”

The Culinary agreed to grieve Durant’s dismissal because the hotel had given Durant no written warning that his job performance was unsatisfactory. At the arbitration hearing, the hotel insisted that it had no such responsibility in this case because Durant’s behavior showed “gross disrespect for supervision” and “undermined the fundamental concept of the employment relationship.” Reinstating Durant would therefore “completely undermine the chef’s authority in the kitchen.”¹⁸ The union representative argued that Durant had acted in the heat of the moment when he and the chef were both under pressure generated by a rush in the workload. He also noted that Durant had yelled at the chef only after he had been insulted, that the hotel occasionally ran out of white receipt slips, and that when that happened the hotel instructed employees to substitute yellow slips for them. Given these extenuating circumstances, the union attorneys argued, Durant should be returned to his job with compensation for lost wages and tips, and without loss of seniority and other benefits.

Arbitrator Irving Bernstein settled the case a year after the incident by dividing responsibility for it as well as the cost of the arbitration. Durant’s misbehavior, he ruled, had been “very serious” and, if left unpunished, would undermine the chef’s legitimate authority in the kitchen. But in handling the incident, the Sand’s management had “misread” it. Durant’s behavior had not been “calculated or intentional” but the product of “a moment of anger,” which under terms of the union contract amounted to insubordination rather than willful misconduct. Durant should not have been dismissed but given a warning and “an opportunity to repair the damage he had caused,” or perhaps suspended without pay for a few days. Anything more than a thirty-day suspension was unreasonable, Bernstein concluded. He therefore directed the Sands to reinstate Durant without loss of seniority and benefits, but also without full compensation for lost wages and tips. To claim back wages for the time he was out of work, Durant had to subtract from the total thirty days pay plus money he had received from the state unemployment office.¹⁹

Another vivid example of insubordination occurred at the Sahara. In May 1970 the Sahara discharged Antonio Sarmiento, a waiter, after he openly challenged a supervisor’s authority. According to the hotel, Sarmiento had “flatly refused” to perform certain setup duties in the restaurant in which he worked because it was “not his job.” When a manager objected, the waiter reportedly “lost his temper” and started “screaming” at him in front of customers, who were “shocked” at his behavior. The Sahara called the incident “willful misconduct” and “a gross violation” of rules pertaining to an employee’s conduct in the presence of customers.²⁰ The union rejected this interpretation of the incident and the hotel’s handling of it, noting that when the encounter occurred, Sarmiento had already completed his own setup duties and was simply refusing to perform someone else’s tasks when the manager called him a “son-of-a-bitch.” The union insisted therefore that Sarmiento’s reaction to the manager’s order deserved no more than a “warning and counseling.”²¹

Arbitrator Sanford Cohen concluded that Sarmiento’s behavior constituted willful misconduct. Several witnesses testified that the waiter had “shouted or screamed” at his supervisor in a voice “audible throughout the restaurant.” Two of the witnesses considered Sarmiento’s behavior a “threat to the physical safety” of his supervisors, one of whom had stepped between the two men to prevent a fight. The fact that the waiter had previously been fired at the Desert Inn for striking a supervisor with a pepper mill in front of customers no doubt influenced the arbitrator’s decision. “By engaging in an emotional avenue of protest,” Cohen ruled, Sarmiento had “made himself liable to discharge without warning notice.”²²

Confrontations between employers and supervisors occasionally resulted not just in violent language but in physical violence and injury. In 1971, for example, Ruth De Jarnette, a waitress in the Savoy Room at the Dunes Hotel, stabbed her supervisor, Frieda Carter, with a ballpoint pen. Carter had complained in front of other waitresses that De Jarnette’s handwritten orders to the chef were illegible, and said, “Kid, you have got to write more distinctly so the chef would know what you are writing.” “Get off my back,” De Jarnette responded in a loud and angry voice, “you don’t know what you are talking about.”²³

Carter prepared a written warning for this incident but waited until De Jarnette went on break to deliver it. Outraged at the notice, De Jarnette warned Carter, “I’ll get even with you.” As the two women returned to work, De Jarnette jammed a pen into Carter’s thigh, penetrating her dress and undergarments. Carter was apparently too frightened or surprised to fire De Jarnette summarily. Instead, she wrote out a termination notice, accusing her of willful misconduct. “Mad at hostess over warning slip,” the notice specified. “Jabbed hostess in leg with her pen.” “I didn’t do it,” De Jarnette responded angrily. “I’m going to the Union about that.”

The Culinary appealed the case to an arbitrator despite the fact that several co-workers supported the supervisor’s account of what happened. The co-workers testified that De Jarnette, who had worked at the Dunes for two years, had a history of threatening behavior. “I’m going to kill that bitch if she don’t leave me alone,” she once said to a co-worker about a supervisor. She had also been involved in earlier altercations, having been reprimanded at the Dunes on one occasion for striking another waitress with a serving tray and on another for kicking a co-worker. She had also had arguments with cooks and busboys, and once called the head chef “a little shit.” The arbitrator considered this background information only secondary to the incident itself, but with De Jarnette’s past behavior in mind, he concluded the hotel had “just cause” for discharging her.²⁴

Some arbitration cases grew out of violence between workers. Despite the exceptional nature of such episodes, two or more employees sometimes found themselves in heated confrontations with each other. In rare instances, these confrontations ended in fistfights and injury. The problem was serious enough for employers to post rules prohibiting fighting in the workplace and to fire employees who “willfully” violated those rules. Management sometimes acted hastily, however, and discharged workers without fully investigating the disturbance between them.

In 1974 the Desert Inn fired Gail Corrow, a pantry worker, for “beating up an employee on company premises and during working hours.” The termination notice described Corrow as a brutish woman with a bad temper, as well as a bad employee. Corrow had, however, worked for the Desert Inn for ten years without a problem. On May 3, Corrow got into a fight with Eva Shock, a waitress. Earlier in the day, Corrow had been aggravated once when Shock haphazardly dumped a batch of freshly baked muffins into a drawer, smashing most of them, and again when Shock gave her an improper order for a sandwich. The sandwich, a “Chef’s Special,” was made on an oval porcelain plate and heated in the kitchen’s “radar oven.” Waitresses were supposed to give the pantry worker one of those plates when placing the order, but in this instance Shock gave Corrow a metal plate unfit for a microwave. Corrow refused to fill the order, and the result was an exchange of harsh words between the women. The waitress further provoked Corrow when she said, “You got a god-damn big mouth,” and spat at her. “Don’t fuck with me,” Corrow responded, leaving her station and slapping Shock. Corrow’s supervisor rushed to the scene, asking what happened. “I hit her,” Corrow admitted. The supervisor fired Corrow summarily. “You have no right to do that,” he said of Corrow’s action. “With that type of attitude I don’t want you in the hotel. Consider yourself terminated.”²⁵

The Culinary asked the hotel to reinstate Corrow. Union officials agreed that Corrow had acted inappropriately but pointed out that Corrow had worked at the hotel for a decade and was well liked by her co-workers. Shock, on the other hand, had worked at the Desert Inn for less than two years and had been in fights before. The hotel refused. Corrow’s action, management insisted, was clearly an example of the “willful misconduct” the union contract prohibited.²⁶

The case ended up in the hands of arbitrator William E. Rentfro, who sided with the union. The hotel should have investigated the circumstances surrounding the fight before dismissing the employee, Rentfro ruled. “A full investigation may have led the employer to impose a more reasonable penalty.” Corrow’s actions were the result of a “brief outburst of temper [that] resulted from at least some provocation” and did not constitute willful misconduct. He therefore reduced the discharge to a thirty-day suspension, and ordered the Desert Inn to reinstate Corrow with back pay and without loss of seniority.²⁷

Some grievances centered on what management thought of as the problem of idling employees. Employers objected to paying workers for doing nothing and did what they could to keep them busy. Employees who kept busy were called “dependable,” “efficient,” and “loyal.” Those who did not were told to keep busy. Employees working eight-hour shifts normally received two ten-minute breaks on the employer’s time, one prior to a thirty-minute meal period and one after it. Employees could not take breaks at their pleasure but according to supervisor-issued schedules. In most workplaces, employees had to “sign out” when they went on break and “sign in” when they returned.²⁸

An incident at the Frontier Hotel in 1968 illustrates management’s concern with these matters. In that year, a hotel supervisor posted standard rules for the resort’s cocktail waitresses prohibiting among other things “goofing off.” “Shirking a fair share of the workload during normal working hours is against the best interest of the hotel and will not be permitted,” the rule read. “Do not visit with other cocktail girls or bartenders. Stay on your station and watch for your customer’s wants.”²⁹

Elaine Hallusco, a waitress at the resort, occasionally ignored this rule. In October 1968 a supervisor found Hallusco polishing her boots in a back room when she was supposed to be on the casino floor. Two days later he spotted her sitting on the arm of a customer’s chair about thirty feet from her workstation. On both occasions, Hallusco received written warnings that she could be terminated for such behavior. Only a day after the second warning, when a security guard reported that Hallusco spent most of an hour sitting on the arm of a customer’s chair outside her work area, the hotel fired her for repeated violations of work rules.³⁰

Hallusco contested the discharge. The termination, she insisted, was the result of a new manager’s urge to fire a few employees to impress others with a show of authority. The union may have doubted Hallusco’s story, but it concluded that the waitress, who had worked in the industry for seven years, had not been given a “reasonable opportunity” to conform to the new prohibition on “goofing off.” Moreover, it thought the prohibition vague. The union thus supported Hallusco when the hotel refused a request to reinstate her. Arbitrator A. Langley Coffey agreed with management, however, ruling that Hallusco, whom he described as an “educated” and “articulate” “young lady,” had “willfully ignored” company rules. He also ruled that the policy in question did not violate the hotel’s union contract.³¹

A case involving Turner Moore, a utility porter at the MGM Grand, also involved “goldbricking.” As a porter, Moore removed trash from bars at the MGM, stocked the bars with ice, and arranged bar glasses by size. He performed this work on the casino floor, near the entrance to the employees’ cafeteria. In April 1975 one of his supervisors observed Moore repeatedly interrupting his work in order to talk to security guards and other employees. Despite an oral warning, Moore continued the behavior. On one occasion, he left his work area to accompany a group of maids through the casino, a violation of work rules. At that point, the hotel gave him a written warning that repetition of such an act could result in termination. Seven months later, when the same manager caught Moore “standing around” outside his work area and “conversing with other employees,” the hotel fired him.³²

In settling this case, arbitrator Howard Block concluded that the hotel’s actions were “excessive,” and “not consistent with widely accepted industrial principles of corrective discipline.” Block ruled, however, that Moore’s conduct warranted “stern disciplinary action.” “Quite obviously, something more than a slap on the wrist is necessary to impress the Grievant that such conduct will not be tolerated,” he said. He therefore reduced the discharge to a suspension and loss of pay of one month.³³

The cases of Moore and other idlers suggest that at least some workers had views of the natural rhythms of work that conflicted with those of management. Even dependable workers might occasionally resist management’s cult of efficiency. Such employees wanted to schmooze with co-workers and sometimes left their workstations to do so. Ten-minute breaks provided only a limited respite. Employees wanted an atmosphere of sociability in the workplace and occasions to loosen up on the job. Pausing to share stories or to joke around with co-workers was no act of resistance but a way to sustain friendships or otherwise cope with the monotony or drudgery of the workday.³⁴

Entertainers too “lounged around” on the job. Especially in the early postwar decades, resorts employed dozens of lounge groups who played music ranging from “top forty” hits to jazz or country standards. Most of them played four or five “sets” each shift, lasting perhaps forty-five minutes each. The musicians in such groups had relatively more freedom than other resort employees did because casinos and hotels contracted with bandleaders, who in turn employed their own sidemen. Entertainment directors, who made these contracts, ultimately controlled entertainment programs, but bandleaders generally determined what their musicians wore, when they rehearsed, and when they took their breaks.³⁵

In 1971 the Landmark hired the Chuck Kovacs Trio for eight weeks to back up hypnotist and singer Pat Collins in its casino lounge. The resort expected the trio to play set songs and themes while Collins hypnotized volunteers from the audience. After three weeks, however, the hotel fired the trio, contending that its performance was inadequate. In the arbitration hearing, the entertainment director testified that members of the trio often failed to coordinate the music with Collins’s act, distracted Collins by talking and laughing among themselves during serious moments in her performance, and often played in the wrong key. Collins herself testified that the band’s behavior was so bad one night that she fell into a “hysterical state” and was unable to perform. In addition, she said, the musicians were habitually late and sometimes drank too much between shows. The musicians in turn complained that Collins’s performances were often “erratic,” and Collins was sometimes “unreasonable in her demands.” She also sang in undesignated keys and failed to give clear cues during performances.³⁶

In grieving the musicians’ dismissal, their union acknowledged that the trio’s behavior was sometimes problematic but appealed for its reinstatement on grounds that the union contract prohibited summary dismissal of musicians except for failure to perform at acceptable levels and then only two weeks after receipt of written notice. Arbitrator Leo Kotkin agreed with the union. Though the trio’s performance was “improper and unacceptable,” he ruled, the hotel should have warned the musicians in writing that they were in danger of losing their jobs. Because Collins insisted she was unable to perform with the musicians, the arbitrator refused to order the Landmark to rehire them. He did, however, award the trio a week’s pay.³⁷

Other grievances involved less weighty issues. One of those at the Dunes Hotel in 1969 concerned whether cocktail waitresses had to buy their work boots. These waitresses served complimentary drinks to gamblers and sold them to others, sometimes charging the cost to the rooms of hotel guests. The contract of the Culinary, to which most of them belonged, had long required employers to furnish and launder uniforms they required their employees to wear and had recently extended this requirement to shoes if the shoes were of a style not normally part of an employee’s wardrobe.³⁸ The case at the Dunes involved this issue. At a time when miniskirts and “go-go” boots were popular among women, the Dunes management introduced white miniskirt uniforms for cocktail waitresses, whereupon the waitresses agreed among themselves that white calf-length boots best matched the new uniforms. Expecting the hotel to reimburse them under terms of their union contract, the waitresses bought boots for themselves at $26.00 a pair. The hotel refused their request for reimbursement, explaining that it had not specified the footwear waitresses had to wear.³⁹

The waitresses complained, arguing to the union that the new uniforms demanded the boots. The union agreed that the boots were integral to the new attire and that management should pay for them. When the union pressed the case, the Dunes banned boots in the workplace. “Starting immediately,” a notice to employees read, “everybody will have to wear shoes instead of boots while working.” Shortly thereafter, the hotel changed the attire required to pink miniskirts, which “clashed” with white boots. The waitresses continued, defiantly, to wear the boots, dying them pink to match the new costumes.⁴⁰

The dispute eventually reached arbitrator John Gorsuch, who in a hearing on the matter had two cocktail waitresses model the miniskirts required by the Dunes and the calf-length boots. The “young ladies looked gorgeous in them,” Gorsuch thought; their appearance was “what makes a cocktail in Las Vegas such a pleasant experience.” Despite this preference, Gorsuch ruled according to the terms of the collective bargaining agreement and found in favor of management. The Dunes had not required cocktail waitresses to wear boots, he ruled, and had never paid for employees’ footwear. “Even though the Arbitrator might think a girl in a pink mini-skirt with matching boots is a bargain at $26.00,” he ruled, “he has no right to make the Dunes pay the price of the boots.”⁴¹

Such episodes were part of labor-management relations. In this era, the language concerning uniforms in the contracts of culinary and bartending employees grew from two sentences to two pages. By 1973 contracts gave employers the right to require certain types of attire, such as black trousers, neckties, and tuxedoes, with the obligation to furnish the required items to employees. No doubt reflecting the dispute at the Dunes, they permitted employers to require cocktail waitresses to wear shoes or boots that matched the color and style of their uniforms, as long as management paid for them.⁴²

Arbitrators sometimes found a middle ground in disputes, obligating the two sides to compromise. They turned terminations of employees into suspensions and reinstated discharged workers with or without back pay. In 1975, for example, after several waitresses tripped walking up and down a set of stairs in the workplace at the MGM Grand, the resort posted a rule limiting the approved footwear of those who used the stairway. “For safety reasons, the maximum sole thickness allowed will be one-half inch and the maximum heel height allowed will be two and one-half inches,” the hotel announced, and it threatened to suspend employees who violated the maximum. “Any employee found in violation of the above will be required to change footwear, which may necessitate the employee clocking out, leaving the premises, changing footwear, and returning to work.”⁴³

The hotel had the right to establish and administer such rules as long as they were not inconsistent with union contracts. It also had to provide unions copies of rules before posting them and discuss the issues involved with union representatives.⁴⁴ The union believed the MGM’s new policy on footwear violated its contract unless management paid for shoes that conformed to the new requirement. The opportunity to insist on this came in 1976, when Billie Jo Hamamura, a cocktail server, violated the new footwear policy on two separate occasions. On January 29, her supervisor noticed that Hamamura wore a pair of “wedgies,” the heels of which were more than two-and-a-half inches high. Confronted, she said her “regulation shoes” were in the repair shop. The manager gave her a written warning for “failure to follow posted house rules,” noting that “repetition will result in suspension.” When the manager noticed Hamamura wearing the same “wedgies” three months later, he suspended her for five days. It was then that she filed a grievance.

When the hotel and the union failed to the resolve the dispute, they submitted it to arbitrator David E. Feller, who ruled that the new rules on footwear were a reasonable safety precaution and did not violate contract language governing employee footwear, which stated that management could require food servers to wear “low heel” shoes. But the arbitrator also ruled that Hamamura’s five-day suspension was excessive. Suspension for a single four-hour work shift, he said, “would have been reasonable under the circumstances of this case.” He therefore directed the hotel to reimburse the cocktail waitress for the remainder of her lost wages.⁴⁵

The Hamamura case illustrates how arbitration patterns expressed workplace behavior. To secure the labor of its employees, management had to accept a certain level of individuality. Supervisors could not enforce every routine work rule all the time without regard for specific circumstances. To do so would not only be bothersome but also risk annoying individual workers. In a rapidly expanding industry in which jobs were plentiful, supervisors sometimes had to relax rules that mattered little. They may have insisted on the footwear rule in this case because Hamamura was an indifferent employee. She had received a warning for “excessive absenteeism” a few weeks before her suspension.⁴⁶

A case concerning personal cleanliness also indicates how arbitration shaped the work world. In 1970 management discharged Margie Duca, a cashier at the Frontier Hotel, for “failure to practice reasonable personal hygiene.” According to the termination notice, Duca exuded “extreme body odor” that, “up to five feet” away, was “foul and offensive.” Other employees complained of the odor to a supervisor, who spoke to Duca about it on three occasions. He had also given her a written warning that she could lose her job for a further offense. On the day of Duca’s dismissal, a hotel executive visited her workstation and decided Duca “had to go.”⁴⁷

Duca appealed to her union, the Teamsters, which concluded that the Frontier had not proved its accusation and should reinstate Duca with back pay. The issue for the union was whether employers could terminate workers unfairly by simply concluding that they had offensive body odor. The arbitrator, William White, ruled that the employer had acted “without just cause” because it failed to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that Duca exuded the purported odor. Some of Duca’s coworkers had in fact testified to the contrary. Only one co-worker testified against Duca, and she had qualified her statements by saying that the “foul” smell was not always noticeable. Given the lack of evidence, the arbitrator ordered the Frontier to reinstate Duca but without back pay.⁴⁸

Management took the issue involved in this case quite seriously. Employees who dealt directly with customers could easily destroy the image of grandeur and fantasy the resorts fostered, especially if they were slovenly or unclean. Resorts expected clerks like Duca to convey the image they wanted to create, not the image workers had of themselves. All of them posted “grooming rules” for the workplace and threatened to suspend or discharge workers who violated them.

Resorts paid particularly close attention to the appearance of parking lot attendants and security guards, who were often the first and last employees hotel guests encountered. The MGM Grand, for example, required parking attendants to keep their fingernails “neat and trimmed,” and their hair “neat and well groomed.” It permitted short mustaches but “no Fu Manchus, handle-bars or beards” and no sideburns “longer than a quarter of an inch below the earlobes.”⁴⁹ Similarly, the Landmark Hotel required security guards to “maintain vigilance and alertness at all time,” which meant keeping their hands out of their pockets and refraining from casual interaction with guests and other employees. Even guards’ private affairs had to be conducted “in such a manner as to cause no derogatory reflection on the Landmark or its Security Department.”⁵⁰

Employees often resented grooming rules and other uniformities that impinged on their sense of individuality and independence. Rather than flagrantly violate such rules, however, they occasionally “forgot” them—“forgot” to trim their nails or mustaches, to make sure their shirts were “clean and neatly pressed,” to polish their boots and accessories, or always to look vigilant and alert. The outward appearance of employees could and often did reflect their own preferences as well as the policies of management.

Still other grievances concerned customer relations. House rules required employees to treat hotel guests courteously and respectfully, even if guests themselves were rude. But employees violated these rules. Waiters and waitresses occasionally insulted customers for not tipping, and switchboard operators sometimes lost patience with guests and hung up on them. Supervisors typically resolved these problems without much difficulty. They knew that customers often misinterpreted the words and gestures of workers or exaggerated their meaning. They also knew how demanding and unreasonable guests could be. Success nonetheless hinged on customer satisfaction, and management was prepared to dismiss workers who offended customers.

While their main task was to park and retrieve the vehicles of guests, parking attendants were also expected to greet customers by opening car doors and directing them to the hotel or casino. The fact that attendants’ income depended heavily on tips usually ensured their courteous treatment of customers, but problems arose when attendants lost their patience with boorish guests. After an incident during summer 1978, the Showboat fired an attendant, Stanley Laird, for cursing at a customer. The customer had violated the hotel’s parking procedures, and Laird lost his temper. Rather than drive into the proper lane and wait his turn behind other drivers, the customer left his vehicle in a through lane and told Laird it belonged to the casino manager. While Laird knew this was untrue, he was accustomed to customers “dropping names” to get special treatment. He told the customer that “it doesn’t make any difference” who owns the vehicle, it had to be in the proper lane to be parked. According to Laird, the customer then told him to “park the fucking car!” According to the customer, who turned out to be a friend of the casino manager, the attendant said “fuck you!” and sped off to park another car. Whatever actually happened, the customer complained and the hotel dismissed Laird.⁵¹

Laird took the case to the Teamsters, which urged the Showboat to reinstate him. The union insisted that if Laird had in fact directed “extreme profanity at a customer,” as management claimed, he deserved a reprimand or suspension, not dismissal. Laird had worked at the Showboat for five years without problems, and the customer had ignored parking rules and provoked Laird’s outburst. Management refused to reconsider the case, however, saying it could not afford to employ people who offended customers.⁵²

The dispute went to arbitrator Richard Basile, who concluded that Laird’s use of profanity in addressing a customer justified the dismissal. “It must be accepted with little or no question that the use of profanity towards a guest of the hotel is sufficient cause for termination,” Basile ruled, “not only under the terms of the collective bargaining agreement, but also under the fundamental understanding of expected customer relations.” Those relations, as Basile put it, “require an employee to be tolerant of a guest’s shortcomings.” Though the arbitrator upheld the termination, he agreed with the union that management had acted “very hastily.” What the employer should have done, he suggested, was to “verbally chastise” Laird and suspend him from duty. “Such a solution would have been more than likely satisfactory to the grieved customer, and a meaningful object lesson to the employee.”⁵³ Those words were of little comfort to Laird, whose response to the contemptible, high-and-mighty customer cost him a job.

The only recourse for parties who lost grievance cases was to appeal to the courts, but such appeals were so rare as to be an unimportant part of the history of grievance proceedings. However, a union could file a court action if the employer refused to submit grievances to arbitration or refused to abide by an arbitrator’s decision. The grievant could file a court action if his or her union did not meet its duty of providing fair representation, such as by failing to pursue a meritorious grievance. Either the union or employer could appeal to courts if they believed an arbitrator overstepped his or her authority. In the 1970s the U.S. Supreme Court established its authority to overturn arbitrators’ decisions if they violated an employee’s civil rights, or if union officials showed “bad faith” during the arbitration process. The high court, however, did not undermine arbitration as a useful instrument for settling workplace disputes.⁵⁴

A dispute involving an employee in the housekeeping department at the Aladdin Hotel confirms the limited role courts were willing to assume in the arbitration process. In January 1983 the Aladdin fired one of its porters, William Prentiss, for leaving the hotel during his shift, violating the union contract as well as the house rules. The Culinary filed a grievance on Prentiss’s behalf, claiming that leaving the hotel was not per se sufficient cause for discharge, especially if a worker faced a personal emergency. The arbitrator in this case sided with the union, concluding that the proper discipline for Prentiss’s action would have been a one-month suspension without pay. He ordered the hotel to reinstate the employee. Hotel management disagreed so strongly with this ruling that it filed a complaint in federal court, arguing that the arbitrator had misinterpreted the hotel’s agreement with the union and overstepped his authority. The district court agreed with the hotel, but a federal appeals court reversed that ruling. The courts ruled that, in cases involving disputes over the meaning of contract language, “the court should not usurp the power of an arbitrator to make the final decision.”⁵⁵

The arbitration process seems to have had a generally calming effect on labor relations in Las Vegas. It helped labor and management to confront disputes through third parties and resolve them with minimal difficulty. It often protected workers’ rights as well as their sense of personal integrity. Yet the process also aided employers in protecting their prerogatives and in rationalizing the workplace. In the new age of corporate ownership, employers used it to make sure workers carried out their tasks properly and with aplomb. Simply having a grievance system in place may have encouraged some workers to contest disciplinary actions, but it no doubt reduced the number of serious disputes in the workplace. Managers hesitated to take arbitrary action against union employees because of the likelihood of having to justify their behavior not only to their own superiors but to a neutral arbitrator as well.

Workplace grievances and arbitration cases speak to two basic premises of this book: that resort workers and their employers had different priorities and interests, and that conflict between the parties was more pervasive than is commonly assumed. Management viewed workplace incidents in terms of their effects on the services promised guests and other customers. In its view, union efforts to overturn disciplinary action amounted to assaults on management prerogatives. Workers saw grievance and arbitration cases as proof of management’s overreach and unreasonableness and as another reason for belonging to a union. If less important in the end than matters of wages and benefits, these differing outlooks help explain why labor and management were often at odds.