No 4
The Struggle for the Casinos
Through the 1960s and early 1970s, a number of unions and individuals made what amounted to a sustained effort to unionize casino dealers, the largest and most important group of nonunionized workers in Las Vegas resorts. Employers successfully resisted that effort but not before granting dealers many of the benefits union organizers promised them, including higher wages, improved work rules, and grievance machinery. The attempt to organize dealers failed because of the adroitness of management in making these concessions, the shortcomings of the union leaders behind the effort, and the indifference or resistance of many dealers to unionization.
The story of this effort, including its failure, reveals a good deal about the labor history of Las Vegas during the period of this study. It helps to illuminate how and why most resort workers joined and supported unions, and how and why employers dealt with unions as they did. Unions, employers, and nonunion workers were all primary players, and each group performed in accordance with its own imperatives. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) oversaw organizing drives, and its broad sympathy for labor within the constraints of the law encouraged organizers and many dealers in the 1960s and 1970s to believe they had a realistic chance to unionize the casinos.
The organizing effort demonstrates some of the limits to labor-management harmony in those years. The unwritten understandings that had stabilized labor relations in postwar Las Vegas had more effect on resort managers and union leaders than on workers and their immediate bosses. The social contract did not apply to nonunion employees, though it did bring them indirect benefits. From 1960 to 1976, the relationship between nonunion workers and their supervisors seems to have been testy and stressful, though there are no objective measures of such conflict. Union strength encouraged resort managers to codify and standardize personnel policies. As the age of corporate ownership unfolded, employers drew up ever more detailed and sophisticated strategies to limit union interference in management prerogatives. The Nevada Resort Association (NRA) contoured dealer organizing drives with the use of such strategies.
Nonunion employees were always a significant minority of resort workforces. In the 1960s and 1970s, as many as a third of the wage earners at resorts were unorganized, the vast majority of them dealers. Of the 1,250 employees at the Tropicana and Sahara in 1970, for example, about 350 to 400 at each place were nonunion, approximately two-thirds of whom were dealers. Most of the other nonunion employees worked in security forces as guards or in casino cage and credit departments handling exchanges of money and credit, or counting and wrapping coins.1
Like their union counterparts, nonunion employees typically worked eight-hour shifts, five or six days a week. They had the same breaks during work shifts as union employees, and the same access to meals at resort cafeterias. They also worked in similarly structured settings with similar lines of authority and job responsibilities. Nonunion workers generally earned lower wages than union employees, had fewer fringe benefits, and had no guaranteed grievance procedures. Security guards, for example, typically earned less than $30 a day in 1970, had no medical and retirement programs, no dental and vision programs, and no grievance machinery in place that prohibited or even discouraged employers from firing or suspending them without “just cause.”2
By 1970 nearly five thousand dealers ran games in greater Las Vegas, most of them in large casinos along the Strip. Though skills needed for the games they dealt varied widely, most knew the intricacies of several games. Dealing crap games demanded perhaps the most intricate skills, because craps was an exceptionally fast-paced game with its own esoteric vocabulary. The language of the game included such terms as “pass,” “pass and odds,” “come,” and “don’t come,” all of which dealers had to understand readily; and they instinctively had to know how to issue playing chips, to move dice and gambling chips from place to place without hesitation, and how to handle proposition bets placed at the center of the table. They similarly had to know how to collect chips from losing players and pay off bets to winners.
Even such games as poker and twenty-one required specialized knowledge and sustained concentration on the part of dealers. After shuffling and dealing cards in twenty-one, dealers had to run the games according to established rules and procedures, compare their own “hand” to the “hands” of the players, and collect debts and pay off winners. At times, they had to explain the game to players, not just quickly but patiently and politely. Baccarat was perhaps the most complex card game. Three dealers usually worked a single baccarat game, two of them as money handlers while the other spelled out the rules, dealt cards, and determined winners. The least skilled dealers often ran games of “big six” wheel of fortune, bingo, or roulette, each of which was so simple to operate that experienced dealers resented being assigned to them. Nearly all dealers performed their tasks standing and under conditions that challenged their ability to concentrate. They worked in smoke-filled environments amid noise from nearby slot machines, lounges, gaming tables, and boisterous, intoxicated gamblers.3
Dealers had a wide range of attitudes toward their work. Some genuinely liked their jobs, seeing themselves as pivotal figures amid the noise of casinos and the excitement of customers winning and losing sometimes-substantial sums of money. “I’ve enjoyed it quite a bit,” one of them recalled. “I’ve dealt to guys that I’ve seen win a quarter of a million dollars in one night, and I’ve seen guys lose a quarter million in one evening.”4 They occasionally dealt to celebrities, which boosted their self-esteem and their identification with their jobs. “We used to get a lot of movie stars come in, the Gabor sisters and oh, Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor, several of the big name stars in those days,” one of them reflected. “As a matter of fact, I dealt to Howard Hughes.” This vivid memory of Hughes showed how much a celebrity might impress a dealer. “He was in his sneakers and this pair of old white duck pants and came over and bet a dollar back and forth on the ‘21’ game.” “He just bet his dollar back and forth, and everybody said, ‘That’s Howard Hughes, that’s Howard Hughes!’”5
Other dealers described their job as a “good livelihood,” yet stopped short of enthusiasm in remembering it. “It’s all I know,” one of them said. “I can’t go do anything else. … I’m just hanging in there day-to-day.”6 Still others were entirely negative in their recollections. “It’s really like working in a factory in Detroit,” one of them observed. “The difference is that a casino is a type of factory where the customers come in to be waited on.”7 Interviewers who talked to dealers in the early 1970s found widespread dissatisfaction. Several dealers complained that rigid work rules made them feel like “machines” programmed to collect money from customers. “I think dealers, and that includes me, are always acting big and important,” one of them said, “but deep down they know how boring the job is and how much crap they have to take from people.”8
Casino managers monitored dealers more closely than any other group of workers and disciplined them for mistakes or misconduct swiftly and on the spot, which explains much of their dissatisfaction. In addition to the human “catwalks” and surveillance cameras hovering above dealers, “pit bosses” and “box men” watched their every move. Supervisors assigned dealers individually and perhaps arbitrarily to stations and games and constantly judged their performance, including the handling of customers. Dealers who struggled with the technicalities of games or failed in the niceties of customer relations might be admonished, shunted to tables with fewer customers (and thus fewer tips), or even dismissed. The rules for dealers and dealing were numerous and restrictive, and casinos enforced them rigidly.
Dealers might be disciplined for slack work, dress infractions, or overfriendliness with individual customers, or for more serious misconduct. “It’s like this,” one of them explained, “say you break the rules, just by a hair because, say you’re tired. There’s a boss behind you. He may not want to holler, but there’s a boss behind him and he says, ‘Either you take care of him, or I take care of you.’”9 Supervisors were particularly hard on dealers who lost the house money. “The bosses behind the dealers would get very upset when the game blew up,” one of them explained. “They would cuss at you and it was a tough situation.”10 Some dealers believed supervisors looked for reasons to discipline or dismiss them, especially older dealers. “Nobody wants a dealer who is growing old,” one of them lamented.11
Unlike unionized workers, dealers had no institutionally or procedurally neutral way to challenge disciplinary action. Supervisors could fire them at will, or at least without having to justify their actions to a neutral third party. Fired or otherwise disciplined dealers could appeal to shift bosses or casino managers, but that seldom seemed to have helped. Casino and resort executives typically supported supervisors in personnel disputes, especially with nonunion employees and especially in cases involving workers charged with violating house rules.12 Dealers also expected termination notices when new owners or managers took over the casinos in which they worked. “It’s a common procedure,” one of them explained, “when a new operation takes over everybody will be losing their job, at least the majority of the people.”13 Rather than fight these practices, dealers moved on to other jobs. In a rapidly expanding industry, it was not difficult for experienced, competent dealers to find jobs.
The absence of grievance procedures was one incentive for dealers to unionize. There were others. Dealers’ wages were low relative to other skilled resort workers, averaging $15 to $25 a day in the 1960s. They thus relied heavily on tips, which generally equaled or exceeded their wages. Unlike union employees, however, dealers had no right to keep their tips. Casinos generally let dealers divide gratuities among themselves according to their own formulas, but they could and sometimes did make unilateral changes in tip-pooling policies to the detriment of individual dealers. A few casinos applied tips toward the minimum hourly wages of dealers, for example, and others made it difficult to collect gratuities on a daily basis. Most required dealers to share gratuities with credit clerks and other casino employees with no opportunities to earn their own tips. Tip-pooling policies were sources of friction in casinos, not only between dealers and supervisors but between groups of dealers working different games.14
Other workplace policies fueled grievances among dealers. Casinos might promote employees arbitrarily, that is, with little regard for qualifications or experience. In fact, they often filled managerial positions with friends of owners or managers, showing little regard for merit or qualifications. “Every time a promotion came up,” one dealer explained, “it was always a friend of somebody’s or something else.” As a result of such favoritism, “I stayed a ‘21’ dealer for a long, long time.”15 In downtown casinos, job-training programs often functioned to exploit experienced workers. In such programs, casinos hired trainees at half the wages of regular dealers, and when regular dealers had trained the trainees, the casinos might replace the regular dealers with the newly graduated trainees or replace the latter with newer and less costly trainees. “The working conditions in most of the downtown casinos are deplorable,” one dealer claimed, referring to such problems as these. “Do you know dealers are working in these casinos for $10.00 a shift, holding down a dealer’s job though classified as an apprentice?” Many such dealers, he said, were “living on false promises.”16 Dealers received none of the benefits of union workers, whether paid holidays and vacations or employer-supported health care.17
Some dealers publicly voiced their frustrations over these conditions. “Every day we read the papers,” one of them wrote to the Sun, “we find some organization on strike for more pay or better working conditions. As the years go by only one group is still at the same poor wage—the dealers.”18 Another wrote the Sun accusing the resorts of “exploiting” dealers. “Are you now so rich,” he asked resort managers and owners, “so secure, so free of worry and fear that you have forgotten what it is like to struggle to make a living? Have you forgotten whose sweat and whose labor put you in such an enviable position?” this letter writer continued. “Give us a pension plan, a retirement fund that we, as dealers, would financially contribute in part to. Give us a hospital and sickness plan comparable to that of the culinary union.”19 Letters to Governor Grant Sawyer voiced similar concerns. One letter described casino operators as “lily-white leeches [who] grow fat on the lifeblood of their employees.” Only unionization would eliminate the dealers’ problems, the letter-writer argued. “Mr. Governor, a union with no restrictions is the only solution that will protect dealers and other casino and hotel help from the exploitation, blackballing, and greed of the owner operators.”20
Yet unionization held risks for dealers. Casino owners and managers vigorously and apparently unanimously opposed it. Their strongest argument was that union job protections and grievance machinery would make it impossible to rid themselves of dishonest dealers in the prompt manner necessary to protect themselves and their honest customers. “If we were held to the same levels of proof and have to provide the same quantum of evidence for termination as we are in a culinary case,” a manager explained, “it would be extremely hard to get a termination.” As he said of dishonest dealers, “You are dealing with sleight of hand. How the hell are you going to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt?”21 Owners and managers worried that unionized dealers would work less rapidly or be more tempted to cheat than was currently the case. To keep gaming honest as well as profitable, they insisted, they must have complete control over dealers. This concern was real. Managers had in fact caught dealers stealing money and participating in scams involving customers and co-workers. How unionization would protect dishonest dealers, however, was not at all clear. How it would protect honest managers was equally puzzling.22
Dealers sympathetic to unionization worried that union activity on their or someone else’s part would bring reprisals in the workplace and even threaten their employment. “When casinos hear talk of a union, they have been known to fire whoever’s talking about it,” a longtime dealer explained. “They’ve been known to fire an entire crew.”23 Management’s response to an earlier effort to organize dealers in the 1950s reinforced these concerns. Within days after the fledgling Dealers Protective Association drew 200 dealers to its first public meeting in 1958, the resorts circulated the names of those dealers and promised to fire any of them who continued to support unionization. Only a dozen dealers showed up at the next meeting, and the association folded.24 Dealers who complained to the press or public officials about such treatment withheld their names for fear of retaliation. “For obvious reasons, yes even physical violence,” a dealer wrote to Governor Sawyer, “I must remain anonymous.”25
While some dealers feared union activity, others saw no need for it. The latter regarded their relations with management as satisfactory and the prospect of unionization as potentially disruptive. They worried that union dues would be money poorly spent, and that union rules would be more burdensome than those they already confronted. Dealers also worried that unionization might require them to share their tips with a larger pool of workers than was already the case, or create a written record of their tip income, thus making that income more vulnerable to taxation. Some saw their jobs as temporary rather than as careers, which undercut their interest in long-range concerns. Others with personal connections to industry higher-ups—those who had “juice,” as it was called—saw no advantage in union hiring halls or seniority systems. Then, too, some dealers saw themselves as individual entrepreneurs who “cut their own deals” with employers. These dealers, one might say, were libertarians who viewed unions as collectivized constraint on their freedom of movement, or “cowboys” in the western vernacular. Such dealers were likely to be antiunion. “Personally, I don’t like unions,” one such “cowboy” said. “There’s no need for a union agent. We rely on ‘juice.’” This attitude, or some variant of it, was sufficiently widespread to hinder unionization efforts.26
The effort to organize dealers began in the early 1960s, when the American Federation of Casino and Gaming Employees (AFCGE) first appeared in Las Vegas. This imposingly named organization was the handiwork of Thomas Hanley, who had earlier headed the Las Vegas local of the sheet metal workers’ union. In 1963, with the help of labor activist Ragnald Fyhen, who had built one of the first trade unions at Boulder Dam, Hanley took control of an inactive local of the Operating Engineers as a vehicle for organizing casino dealers.27
Hanley’s role in this effort was problematic from the start, at least from the standpoint of established unions. Hanley had been in Las Vegas since 1941. After the war, he had helped unionize sheet metal workers, who among other tasks installed air-conditioning units in hotels and casinos. While doing this earlier organizing, he had earned an unsavory reputation. Guns, narcotics, and violence seem to have been as much a part of his life as unions and labor relations. He was arrested several times in the 1950s and early 1960s on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to grand larceny, and he was a suspect in the unsolved murder of union agent James Hartley, who was shot in the head, his body thereafter dumped in the desert. Press accounts leave the impression that Hanley had arranged Hartley’s murder as well as the brutal beating of another union business agent in order to consolidate his control over the sheet metal workers’ union and its finances. Concerns about Hanley’s character eventually resulted in his expulsion from the sheet metal workers’ union for “bringing [the] union into disrepute.”28
When Hanley’s name resurfaced in the 1960s, the Las Vegas press described him as a “hoodlum” who had “crawled out from under the rocks.” The Sun compared Hanley to Hitler and urged dealers to have nothing to do with him or his union. Casino managers charged that Hanley and some of his associates had bribery, larceny, and arson records and warned that the control of such men over gaming employees would destroy the integrity of casino gambling. Hanley’s reputation thus compromised his drive to organize dealers, despite the fact that some dealers came to believe that only a man such as Hanley had the resourcefulness necessary to unionize the casinos. The din of adverse publicity Hanley generated drowned out his charges that management threatened to fire and blacklist dealers who had anything to do with any unionizing effort.29
Hanley was a master schemer. In 1964 he and his agents used multiple strategies to organize casino workers. They first approached slot machine mechanics, then numbering three or four hundred in and around Las Vegas, believing their special skills would make it difficult for management to replace them if they struck for union recognition. When the Operating Engineers claimed jurisdiction over the mechanics, Hanley switched to change girls and booth cashiers, promising them pay raises and increased benefits as well as training programs to improve their skills in return for joining his union. He also promised to “insist upon women receiving equal pay with men.”30 Originally targeting change girls and cashiers in major resorts, Hanley soon realized that those in small clubs, where tips were also small, were more interested in unionization. He therefore promised to negotiate wages according to the size and revenue of individual casinos, $25 a day for small ones and $30 a day for large ones. Throughout these maneuverings, Hanley turned to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to legitimize his organizational effort and to prevent management from intimidating his organizers and sympathizers.31
Resort owners and the state officials beholden to them resisted Hanley’s effort to involve the NLRB in his organizing effort, insisting that gaming was a local industry, distinct from interstate commerce, and thus beyond the reach of federal agencies. Nevada attorney general Harvey Dickerson went so far as to suggest that bringing casinos under the jurisdiction of federal agencies would compromise efforts already well underway to rid the Nevada gaming industry of organized crime. “If a guy’s cheating, he’s got to be fired today,” Dickerson said of the generic dealer. “If you let him work two more weeks, he will be cheating for two more weeks.”32 Employers were responsible for curtailing illegal activity in their casinos, Dickerson reminded the NLRB, and must have the power to discharge employees caught in, or even suspected of, such activity “without delay” and without revealing how they discovered the illegal activity. He also noted that the Nevada Gaming Commission had the sole right to license dealers and that, in exercising that right, gave employers “flexibility” in matters relating to dealer honesty in the workplace. If either unions or the federal government prevented employers from hiring and firing dealers at will, Dickerson said, the state would likely establish a licensing system for dealers that would have the effect of strictly controlling the hiring and firing of all dealers and perhaps other casino employees as well.33
Hanley’s insistence that the NLRB had jurisdiction over his efforts to organize dealers rested in part on an earlier NLRB ruling that the Thunderbird Hotel and the Clark County sheriff had violated the National Labor Relations Act by questioning employees about their union activities and by discharging a security guard for joining a union. In that case, the sheriff’s office had revoked the guard’s license for refusing to answer questions about his union activity. According to the sheriff, no one he deputized could join a union because to do so would conflict with his or her loyalties to his office. Sheriff’s deputies, he argued, were employees of the state of Nevada and thus were not covered by the key provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. The Thunderbird supported the sheriff in this contention and dismissed the employee because he now lacked the proper security credentials. The NLRB rejected arguments that the sheriff’s action was beyond its jurisdiction and ruled that, though licensed by the state, hotel security guards were resort employees with “self-organizational rights.” The board then oversaw an election that resulted in the unionization of guards at the Thunderbird. That decision—as well as the outcome of that election—indicated that the NLRB would likely assert jurisdiction over disputes generated by Hanley’s efforts to organize dealers.34
In the spring of 1964, Hanley’s organizers began passing out registration cards, hoping to get 30 percent of the dealers in one or more casinos to pledge their intent to join his union; such a response could secure NLRB jurisdiction over a unionization vote. They promised to appeal to the NLRB on behalf of dealers fired for union sympathy or activity. When El Cortez and the Dunes did just that, Hanley charged them with unfair labor practices as defined by the federal Labor Relations Act and filed similar charges against the Tropicana when a slot mechanic there was allegedly fired for union activity.
In the summer of 1964, Hanley’s union claimed that two thousand casino employees had signed membership applications. Though few of the signers had paid any union dues, the number emboldened Hanley. Claiming to have the necessary pledges of 30 percent of dealers at several resorts, including the Hacienda, the Showboat, and the Castaways, Hanley petitioned the NLRB to recognize his union as the bargaining agent for dealers in these properties. The board held hearings on the petition.35 Pressing his case at the hearings, Hanley accused the casinos of refusing to negotiate with his union and of blacklisting his union’s sympathizers. Overplaying his hand, Hanley called a strike at the Hacienda, the California Club, the New Frontier, and the Castaways. In response, a few dealers at these properties walked away from their jobs, and the resorts promptly fired them. Hanley then filed legal actions demanding reinstatement and compensation for lost wages for the fired employees.36 At the same time, he urged Governor Sawyer to intervene in the dispute. Sawyer asked the resorts if they wanted his assistance or that of the state labor commissioner, but all declined the offer. Sawyer had no further authority. “The role of the governor in mediating labor disputes gives me no power to force mediation,” he told Hanley concerning his authority under Nevada state law.37
Sawyer’s earlier opposition to unionizing dealers probably undermined public support for the strike and the organizing drive. Unionization of dealers, Sawyer told state labor leaders in August, would infringe on the right of the state to regulate the employment of individuals engaged directly in gambling. Though the governor acknowledged the right of dealers to bargain collectively concerning wages, working conditions, and job benefits, he opposed any arrangement that gave unions—or any third party—control over the hiring and firing of dealers. If Hanley’s union forced that on employers, Sawyer promised to implement a licensing system prohibiting the employment of dealers suspected of dishonesty or of ties to organized crime. “In order to properly control the industry,” Sawyer said, “the state must not only be able to revoke a license granted to management, but as well the state must be in control of those who are engaged in the industry in [an] employee capacity.”38
Hanley rejected the notion that unionization would result in the hiring of dishonest or mob-connected dealers or interfere with state oversight of employees engaged in gambling. In a strategic move to deflect Sawyer’s opposition and to shore up support for his union, Hanley announced that the contracts of dealers he organized would include language assuring the right of resorts to discharge dealers quickly and easily. He was not seeking control over hiring and firing in casinos, he assured Sawyer and the Gaming Control Board, but over wages and working conditions there. These concessions did nothing to soften resistance to unionization, and a management spokesman dismissed them as a “desperation play.” Moreover, the concessions removed a major incentive for unionizing. Hanley had agreed to leave matters of hiring and firing to management, a practice that currently blackballed job applicants for supporting union activity and terminated dealers for capricious or dubious reasons as well as for dishonesty or mob connections. “What good is a union that gave up the right to protect jobs?” union-leaning dealers now asked.39
Buffeted by public criticism and uncertain leadership, Hanley’s union had by 1965 lost many of its members. But his movement gained new life that year, when the NLRB completed investigating his appeals and ruled on the matters he raised. In a series of rulings known collectively as the El Dorado decision, the board gave the now largely discredited Hanley a major victory. The board found that resort owners in Nevada were engaged in interstate commerce and thus subject to NLRB jurisdiction; and that casino employees, including dealers, had the same right as other workers in interstate commerce to organize in accordance with relevant federal laws. In the words of the press, these rulings constituted a “poker-faced decision that jolted the Nevada gambling industry.” In a bold stroke, the NLRB had dismissed management’s interpretation of the law and had substituted for it a positive declaration that federal law encouraged collective bargaining, in gaming as in other industries, and that the resorts’ fears of “undesirables” infiltrating the industry through a dealers’ union were “unwarranted” by the facts of the case. The ruling had the potential for transforming labor relations in casinos.40
Hanley used the ruling to try to launch his organizing movement once again. He reiterated charges that the casinos had bargained in bad faith and had used “intimidation and coercion” against dealers favoring unionization. He petitioned the NLRB to approve representation elections at the Hacienda, the Sahara, the Thunderbird, and several smaller resorts, including the Silver Nugget in North Las Vegas and the Golden Gate and the California Club downtown. To husband his limited resources, he concentrated picketers at high-profile locations where he thought employers were most vulnerable to pressure. He thus made the most of his would-be union, which in late 1965 had perhaps 300 dues-paying members and a monthly income of no more than $1,500.41
Dealer unionization seemed to gain a foothold in January 1966, when an NLRB-ordered representation election occurred at the Golden Gate Hotel. In what the press called a “boss-wrenching victory,” dealers there voted 72 to 38 to make Hanley’s union their bargaining agent. A few weeks later, after another victory at another small casino in North Las Vegas, the Bonanza Club, Hanley signed the first union contract in history covering Las Vegas dealers. The contract gave the club’s forty casino dealers wages of $25 a shift, health and welfare benefits, grievance procedures, paid vacations, and nondiscrimination guarantees.42 It was a good contract for the dealers, giving them wages and benefits matching those of other equally skilled union employees in the industry.
Hanley and his union now savored the prospect of industry-wide success. His organization had tapped a reservoir of frustration among dealers and had won the right to represent a handful of them in and around Las Vegas. The NLRB had played a major role in this success, and the future of his union seemed bright. As this prospect dawned, the Sun blamed casino managers for “losing touch” with dealers and other workers, thereby inviting the unionization they and the Sun so dreaded. “Little by little, their faith, their confidence, their trust in you has eroded,” the Sun said to the managers. “They feel you could not care less about their futures, their hopes, their ambitions.”43 Hanley and his union had turned anger and frustration into opportunity. In February 1966 the union threw an all-day party to celebrate its gains and prospects, inviting union members and sympathizers from across the city. Hanley was confident enough to use the occasion to criticize Governor Sawyer, who had begun to campaign for reelection. The governor, he charged, had done little to improve the livelihood of workers in Nevada.44
This confidence continued into the spring, when the NLRB ordered the Hacienda to reinstate forty-two dealers fired a year and a half earlier for sympathizing with union activity. Hanley hailed the ruling. “At no time have we ever asked for anything ridiculous,” he told reporters, only that resort employees be “treated like human beings.” The Hacienda ruling seemed, finally, to be the weapon Hanley needed to organize dealers.45
Suddenly, Hanley’s hopes and expectations turned into disappointment. In May 1966, he lost a certification election at the Thunderbird, a major Strip casino, when dealers there voted 72 to 44 against his union. According to Thunderbird management, which spent more than $50,000 to fight the organizing campaign, most of their dealers realized that the unionization of dealers jeopardized the gaming industry and thus rejected it for their own well-being. Some dealers did in fact fear that union activity threatened their jobs. The Thunderbird had recently fired some of its security guards for trying to unionize. Hanley reacted to this major setback by accusing the Thunderbird of intimidating union sympathizers and bribing others to vote against the union, and by appealing to the NLRB. The NLRB found Hanley’s charges justified and set aside the election results. Even so, in view of the lopsided vote against it, it seemed unlikely the union would win a new vote at the Thunderbird. The union’s drive had stalled.46
The resulting stalemate continued through the summer of 1966, when the union suffered a series of setbacks. In June, Hanley’s longtime associate and bodyguard Mike Marathon was brutally beaten by unidentified assailants outside a Las Vegas coffee shop. The reason for the attack was unclear, but it hospitalized Marathon and prompted the press to revive earlier charges of hooliganism or worse against Hanley and his associates. The Sun described Marathon as a “man of violence,” a “five-cent punk,” and suggested that the assault upon him was at Hanley’s direction in retaliation for an act of betrayal. As these events unfolded, Ragnald Fyhen, the longtime labor activist who had helped Hanley’s organizing effort, resigned as president of Hanley’s union. Fyhen left the position, he said, because his declining health had kept him from involvement in union affairs for some time. The press rejected this explanation and instead described his resignation as a “revolt” against Hanley’s “morals and ethics.” Whether any or all of this was true is unclear, but the adverse publicity added to the mounting problems of Hanley and his effort to unionize dealers. In the aftermath, in July, his union lost NLRB-supervised elections at the Mint and Lucky Casino by wide margins. Hanley had significantly overestimated the appeal of his union, and these results fueled a sense of defeatism among his supporters and everyone else that supported dealer unionization.47
Hanley’s unionization effort collapsed in November when Las Vegas police arrested Hanley and his chief organizer, Glen Herron, for assaulting an agent of the Internal Revenue Service. This untoward incident was a consequence of an IRS investigation of Hanley for income tax evasion. There is no hint in the available historical records of what prompted this investigation, though one may speculate on its relationship to his effort to unionize dealers. Be that as it may, in the course of the investigation, two IRS agents went to Hanley’s office to serve a summons on Herron to testify in the case. When the agents arrived, Hanley and Herron were outside the office, where the agents served the summons. When Herron refused to accept the summons, Hanley allegedly became “abusive” and “pushed” one of the agents. The agents then decided to have Hanley arrested, for which purpose one of them called the police while the other followed Hanley into his office. There, Hanley allegedly hit the trailing agent in the face and stomach, whereupon the agent allegedly drew his gun and forced Hanley to back away. When the agent holstered his gun, Herron allegedly “attacked” him. At that point, the arrival of the police restored order and generated documentation for what happened thereafter. The injured IRS agent was taken to the hospital with “a bruise on the side of the face” and “a hurt tail bone,” while Hanley and Herron were taken to the Clark County jail, where they spent eight hours before being released. A week later a federal grand jury indicted Hanley and Herron for interfering with the work of IRS agents.48
Hanley’s union, along with its effort to organize dealers, faltered in the wake of this incident. It lost another certification election a few weeks later, at the New Pioneer. There, Hanley’s organizers had been recruiting for more than two years, but the NLRB had repeatedly delayed a certification election to investigate charges of unfair labor practices by both management and the union. When the dealers finally voted, they rejected union representation by a margin of 31 to 17. Over the ensuing six months, the union lost representation elections at the California Club downtown, at Jerry’s Nugget in North Las Vegas, and at the Silver Nugget on the Strip. In the last of these elections, only 4 of 72 dealers voted to make Hanley’s union their bargaining agent. After this serialized debacle, Hanley promised to continue his organizing campaign, but he never did. His life deteriorated in the aftermath of these disappointments. In the late 1960s, he was arrested on four separate occasions for actions that generated charges of extortion, robbery, and even murder. He was convicted only of assaulting the IRS agent, however, for which he served a year in prison. When he was released in March 1970, his union had folded.49
While Hanley’s union clung precariously to life, several other organizations surfaced in Las Vegas, each bent on unionizing casino dealers. The United Casino Employees Union (UCEU), headed by Truman Scott, an erstwhile Hanley lieutenant, emerged in 1967. Scott and others in his union had broken with Hanley that year and moved to Reno, where they endeavored to unionize dealers and other casino workers. Their effort had the backing of the International Seafarer’s Union of the AFL-CIO, which had an eclectic membership of nearly 40,000 when it chartered Scott’s union. Scott’s efforts in Reno were no more successful than Hanley’s in Las Vegas. When Hanley exited the labor scene in Las Vegas, Scott entered, only to see his union lose representation elections at the Dunes and the Desert Inn. The Seafarer’s Union and then Scott himself abandoned the organizing campaign. A spokesman blamed the failure on the “tremendous element of fear” among casino workers.50
The fear was no doubt real. In the aftermath of Hanley’s fall, hotel and casino managers continued their relentless opposition to the unionization of dealers, hiring spies to inform them of union activity. One of those spies, John McQueen, worked at the Castaways, which Scott tried to organize in 1968. Whenever Scott’s organizers entered the Castaways, McQueen trailed them and made notes on what they did and said. “At approximately 1100 hours,” McQueen wrote in January, “Frank Gill, an organizer for the seafarers union, arrived at the Castaways Casino. He was kept under close surveillance until his departure at 2300 hours.” While there, Gill “was overheard on the telephone in the Castaways saying, ‘They are not very friendly here. They won’t let me solicit in the dealers’ room.’”51 In another confidential report, one of the Castaways dealers, Rick Sommers, told his supervisors that organizers had come to his home soliciting his support for the union drive. “They told me that organizing the dealers at the Castaways was the key to their organizing the other casinos,” Sommers reported to his supervisors. “They told me again that I was a key man in their organizing the Castaways and if I signed other dealers would sign. I again refused to sign.”52 Such reports enabled employers to monitor union support and identify “loyal” as well as “disloyal” employees.
The Culinary also undertook a campaign to organize dealers. To do so, it created a new affiliate, Casino Employees Local 7, in April 1967. The head of the affiliate was M. R. “Mushy” Callahan, a longtime organizer from California who once worked on gambling ships off the coast of San Diego.53 The Culinary evidently hoped that the impending end of its contract with downtown gambling establishments that year and the implicit threat of a work stoppage that it implied would provide the leverage necessary for Callahan to organize dealers. Events quickly proved otherwise. When culinary workers and bartenders struck downtown properties over wage-related issues on April 18, Callahan encouraged dealers at those properties to join the strike, promising that the Culinary would not settle the strike until employers recognized the casino workers’ union and came to terms with it. But few dealers honored the Culinary’s picket lines. On the contrary, some of them staffed struck positions. This response showed the limits of labor solidarity in Las Vegas and the lack of enthusiasm among dealers for unionism.54
Management developed new strategies against casino organizing after major Strip properties transformed the Nevada Resort Association into a management bargaining unit in the late 1960s. The association’s chief negotiator, William Campbell, kept close track of the organizing campaigns and developed strategies to resist and ultimately defeat them. A centerpiece in those strategies was Campbell’s insistence in 1970 that, in return for generous pay and benefit increases, the Culinary and Bartenders would give management the right to fire workers for honoring picket lines established for organizational purposes. That meant that unionized workers could not honor picket lines set up by or on behalf of unorganized dealers.
In 1971 the operating engineers’ union challenged this management strategy in a well-publicized effort to organize dealers and slot machine mechanics at the Tropicana Hotel. The union hoped to capitalize on the Tropicana’s pending sale, which generated uncertainty among employees about their jobs, and the union worked to turn this uncertainty into an advantage. Organizers collected enough pledge cards to warrant a representation election, which the NLRB scheduled for November 12, 1971.55 Campbell promptly launched a “vigorous campaign” against the union effort. “The loss of control and the economic burdens that would flow from dealer’s unionization,” Campbell said, “dictate that the industry make whatever sacrifices as may be necessary to ensure the defeat of the union’s efforts at the Tropicana.” Should its dealers strike, Campbell advised, the Tropicana should hire replacements “as quickly as possible,” without waiting for the response of the Culinary to the strike. The replacement workers, he pointed out, could then vote in the representation election, knowing that a union victory would cost them their jobs.56
Campbell’s fears never materialized. The dealers and slot machine mechanics at the Tropicana rejected unionization by a vote of 97 to 48, most of them evidently preferring the uncertainties of the status quo to the risks of unionization in the face of management opposition. Wages and working conditions at the Tropicana were better than those in most casinos, a fact that reflected management strategies for dealing with unionization efforts. On the advice of Campbell, the Tropicana refused to allow organizers into the resort and prohibited its own employees from handing out union flyers or otherwise soliciting support for unionization. In communicating with the dealers and slot mechanics, managers emphasized the risks of unionization, including the loss of individuality when interacting with supervisors and the recurring periods of labor unrest, including strikes.57
As the struggle at the Tropicana unfolded, Nevada legislators passed laws eliminating some of the worst abuses in casinos. They made it a crime for employers to credit tips toward the payment of wages or to require employees to give them a share of their tips as a condition of employment. They also gave employees the right to agree among themselves on the division of tips. The new laws thus recognized that employees who received tips were entitled to them and that employers had no control over the tip income of their employees. Dealers welcomed these laws as devices that would meaningfully improve their income, and that may have been the legislative intent in enacting them: to undermine the trade-union movement by removing dealers’ incentives to organize. Organizers had promised to address these issues and had hoped that such promises would encourage dealers to join the union cause.58
The legislature’s action helped slow the unionization effort. It was not until 1974 that the next significant episodes occurred. In May of that year, dealers who worked the craps tables at the newly opened MGM Grand formed their own in-house union, the MGM Crap Dealers Association, and petitioned the NLRB for recognition. They evidently did so out of frustration with the MGM’s tip-pooling procedures, which forced them to share tips with less experienced dealers who earned smaller tips or no tips at all. The association was unlike a union in that its members paid no dues and its leaders worked without compensation. Its president, Bob Jenkins, called unions “unruly monsters,” and in bargaining with management promised to consider “the stockholders and the vast amount of money” they had invested in their properties. The NLRB refused to recognize Jenkins’s association as a union, however, on grounds that its membership was too limited.59
In the wake of that refusal, dealers at the Sahara formed a more inclusive in-house organization, which the NLRB did recognize. The Sahara Dealers Association (SDA), as it called itself, included card and dice dealers as well as keno runners, baccarat game starters, shills, and brush-men. Its purpose was “to advance the interest of Sahara Hotel casino employees in their relationship with management,” and to that end the SDA pledged to work to improve wages, benefits, and job security and to establish arbitration machinery to deal with employee grievances.60 Job security was the reason for the association’s initial success. The Sahara had recently dismissed a number of employees for what organizers of the new union considered arbitrary reasons, including unacceptable hairstyles, facial blemishes, and foreign accents. By August, when the association petitioned the NLRB for a representation election, it claimed 250 members.61
The SDA represented a new industry-wide challenge to management. If casino workers at the Sahara could form their own union, employers worried, so could those at other resorts. When the NLRB scheduled a certification election for the SDA for October 1974, managers at all resorts were concerned.62 The Sahara itself acted to derail the SDA. A month before the election, its casino manager wrote to “all supervisors” detailing “basic rules” for dealing with organizing activity. Pit and shift bosses were not to discriminate against employees sympathetic to the union, but they should question them about the integrity of the SDA. “Does the union really have any interest in the welfare of the employees of this company,” supervisors should ask, “or [is] it really interested in creating some good paying jobs for some union officials?” They should also remind pro-union employees that “there are certain risks involved in being represented by a union, such as the possibility of strikes and loss of your earnings if the union calls a strike.”63 The Sahara also told its casino employees that “leaders of the so-called ‘association’ haven’t levelled with you.” “don’t be mislead [sic], a union means confrontation, not cooperation.”64
Whether such admonitions had any effect is unclear, but dealers rejected the SDA by a vote of 180 to 155.65 Casino managers across Las Vegas breathed a sigh of relief, and those at the Sahara were especially pleased. “It is with a deep sense of gratitude,” they wrote to dealers, “that we accept your expression of confidence in us.”66 The results of this election are best read as an expression of the divided minds of dealers on unionization. Nearly half of those at the Sahara had voted to unionize, and it is difficult to know what those who voted against unionization thought of management. One of the latter voiced what seemed to be a widespread feeling when he asked after the election, “Why should you have two bosses?”67 Some dealers apparently viewed the traditional role of management vis-à-vis labor as part of the natural order of work, a view that made unions suspect among workers who, as Marxists might say, had not had their class consciousness raised. In other words, these dealers rejected the notion that labor relations were “objectively” exploitative, an idea that, where it existed, pushed workers toward unionization.
Press reports suggested that the Sahara defeat spelled the end of dealer unions. But a month later, dealers at the Desert Inn voted 88 to 80 to make another emergent union, the Casino Employees of Nevada, their bargaining agent. An affiliate of the Chicago-based Brotherhood of Railway, Airline and Steamship Clerks, Freight Handlers, Express and Station Employees (BRAC), the union gained support at the Desert Inn with promises of higher wages, increased benefits, and “the right to work with a little self-respect and dignity.” It won there despite management opposition, though the vote, like that at the Sahara, reflected the divided outlook of dealers as a group.68 During the organizing campaign, Howard Hughes’s Summa Corporation, the Desert Inn’s parent company, announced significant pay raises for dealers at all of its properties. The hikes, management announced, were “one of the many steps that are being taken to continually insure that our employees are properly compensated for the fine jobs they perform.”69 Nonetheless, the union prevailed, and the victory buoyed the hopes of union activists. It is “just a matter of time,” a BRAC spokesman boasted about the prospects of success for organizing dealers. “There is no question about that.” In fact, there was a question. The Desert Inn challenged the result of the election, charging that union organizers had violated the law governing representation elections by misrepresenting conditions of employment at recently unionized casinos in Puerto Rico. The NLRB agreed to investigate the charge.70
As the investigation proceeded, the Culinary, prompted by BRAC’s success, resurrected its dealers’ organization, Local 7. According to Al Bramlet, “scores” of dealers had recently asked him to help them form a union, and the revival of Local 7 was his response to their plea. “Prior to this past year,” Bramlet said, “the dealers have not shown the enthusiasm they have put forth in the past few weeks toward getting together.” The Culinary, he added logically, was the “best and most logical” home for organized dealers. The union had a long and successful record of negotiating in the resort industry and, with more than twenty thousand members, was in a position to pressure management to recognize a dealers’ union.71
This assessment was more hopeful than realistic. In early 1975 BRAC lost representation elections at the Royal Inn and the Flamingo Hotel, in both instances by three-to-one margins. The union rebounded with a narrow victory at the Landmark, where dealers earned smaller tips and harbored more resentment toward management, only to have the NLRB set aside the result after management charged the union with misleading dealers during the election campaign. A more significant setback came in April, when dealers at the MGM rejected unionization by a three-to-two margin. This decisive loss may be partly explained by the fact that three unions—BRAC, the Culinary, and a new organization affiliated with the Teamsters—vied for the right to represent the dealers.72
In all these elections, management maneuvering bested that of union organizers. At the larger Strip casinos, executive officers worked closely with casino supervisors to undermine union appeal. MGM president Alvin Benedict, former head of hotel operations for Howard Hughes and president of the NRA, urged casino managers to remind dealers that unionization “will present serious problems to the operation of the casino, and to dealers and supervisors alike.” At the same time, Benedict warned the managers that he would no longer tolerate “thoughtless” disciplinary action. “We realize that a few of the supervisors have been too abrupt and inconsiderate in their contacts with dealers,” Benedict said. “This we will not tolerate. If a dealer has to be reprimanded for an infraction of the rules, he should be taken aside and told. He should not be degraded by being shouted at in front of others.”73 In addition, Benedict met with dealers and reminded them that wages and working conditions at the MGM were among the best in Las Vegas and that unionization would reduce these to industry averages. “Hiring halls, hotel-wide seniority, formal grievance procedures, arguments about tips, hassles over leaves of absence and the loss of personal contact between players and management trouble me greatly,” Benedict told dealers, predicting the troublesome consequences of unionization. “I think they should trouble you too.”74
Employers found other ways to blunt the lure of unionization. They made notable improvements in workplace rules and conditions, for example, and some even raised wages. Benedict himself asked dealers how to improve the workplace and implemented some of their suggestions. He installed drinking fountains in the casinos and lockers for dealers, had the parking lot for casino employees fenced for safety purposes, and modified gaming tables to make dealing easier. “We have adjusted some salaries in accordance with area surveys,” he also noted, as if the increases were voluntary. Most important, he rationalized personnel policies. Dealers would thenceforth receive written warnings of unsatisfactory work, and two such notices would be necessary within six months for termination except in cases of dishonesty, drunkenness, or willful misconduct. Benedict also instituted a seniority system for promotions and, thus, for pay and layoffs.75
At the industry-wide level, in the summer of 1974, the NRA established a Salary Review Committee to study wages and benefits for dealers and to recommend uniform standards as well as procedures for handling grievances. The committee soon proffered a pay scale for dealers ranging from $25 to $36 a day, as well as industry-wide policies on holidays, meal privileges, vacations, and benefit programs. It also proposed new procedures for nonunion workers to file complaints against supervisors without fear of reprisal.76
These recommendations were clearly designed to diminish the appeal of unionization, which the NRA continued to call a “serious threat” to management control of casinos. “I am convinced,” William Campbell said at the time in a memorandum to NRA members, “that unions will prevail unless management immediately develops a comprehensive, positive program that offers casino personnel a rational alternative to union representation.” Cooperation in achieving that goal was imperative. “We can ill afford the luxury of going it alone or tolerating half-hearted or in effective measures by member establishments,” Campbell continued. “If we don’t hang together, we shall surely all hang separately.” To facilitate the cooperation he thought necessary, Campbell proposed the formation of a steering committee, culled “from top management ranks only” to develop strategies for an ongoing antiunion campaign; to create a centralized agency to provide industry executives with “expert advice” on matters of publicity, law, and “campaign tactics”; and to implement an industry-wide program of assistance to individual resorts targeted by union organizers.77
Accepting Campbell’s approach, industry leaders formed a seven-man committee that included such major management figures as Jack Binion, Steve Wynn, and Jackie Gaughan to direct the campaign against dealer unionization.78 The committee concerned itself especially with the Culinary’s effort to organize dealers. Campbell seems to have considered this the greatest threat. To blunt it, he suggested that the hotels learn all they could about relationships between their dealers and culinary workers, including “whether any [of their] casino employees [were] related to culinary workers by blood or marriage.”79 He had “no accurate information on the amount of success the Culinary is having” in organizing dealers, he complained, giving the hotels the names of two organizers “on the culinary payroll,” urging that they be barred from casinos under the “no solicitation” rule.80
The hotels followed Campbell’s advice. They checked dealers’ relatives in the industry and contacted previous employers about the union sympathies of individual dealers. “Information is that he is an agitator, who may very well be involved in union activity,” read a memo on Frontier hotel stationery evidently written by a house detective about a dealer suspected of union sympathy. The detective thought another dealer trustworthy because his father had been a “casino executive” at the Flamingo.81
In mid-1975 the NLRB dealt a major blow to the movement to unionize dealers by overturning BRAC’s 1974 victory in the Desert Inn representation election. Accepting the employer’s charges, the board concluded that a union organizer had “grossly” misrepresented the wages and working conditions of casino workers in Puerto Rico, whom BRAC had recently organized. The organizer, from Puerto Rico, had claimed that five thousand unionized dealers in Puerto Rico earned $1,200 to $1,500 a month, when in fact there were fewer than seven hundred dealers in Puerto Rico and their pay ranged from $300 to $1,125 a month. The organizer had also misrepresented grievance procedures in Puerto Rico, claiming that employers there had to prove charges of thievery against dealers in court before discharging them. Because the Desert Inn had had insufficient time to investigate and refute these claims, the board ordered a new representation election.82
With that setback, the unions had almost nothing substantial to show for their long struggle to organize dealers. Not a single casino was now organized, in part because the organizing drives had forced casinos to raise dealers’ wages meaningfully and to relax their supervisory prerogatives notably. In addition, the casinos had introduced what William Campbell called a “formalized system of communication between management and casino employees and [an] appeals procedure in discharge cases.”83 To be sure, these results lacked the force of similar guarantees for unionized workers. Nonetheless, they gave dealers significant new benefits and protections. “The agitation itself did improve working conditions,” a former head of the Nevada Gaming Control Board later acknowledged.84 Even the local press, which never supported the unionization of dealers, recognized these gains. “In fact,” the Valley Times stated, “the threat of unionization has resulted in improved working conditions and better benefits for casino workers. It has forced management to treat the dealers better.” As a result, “the lure of unionization is less appealing.”85
Hotel managers understood this result, and their confidence in the rightness of their approach increased when dealers at the Desert Inn rejected unionization in December 1975 by a vote of 110 to 94. This defeat ended BRAC’s effort to organize dealers. Union sympathizers, perhaps buoyed again by the split minds of dealers that this vote once again showed, pledged plaintively to “try again.” “The right to organize does not end here,” one of them reminded the press. Management was nevertheless exultant. “Justice has prevailed,” an executive of the Desert Inn said after this latest election. “My heart is warm.”86 These words recalled those of Andrew Carnegie when he heard that striking employees had lost everything at his Homestead Steel Plant in 1892, all but destroying the trade-union movement in the steel industry.
The failure to organize Las Vegas dealers is best understood as an example of what adamant and effectively organized employers can accomplish in opposing unions when circumstances break in their favor. The management of every resort resisted dealers’ unions; there was no known exception. All of them used whatever instruments of power, persuasion, or influence at their disposal to break dealer-organizing campaigns. Their hired consultants offered expert advice on how to use NLRB rules and procedures to delay and appeal the results of representation elections regardless of what those results indicated about dealers’ preferences. William Campbell of the NRA played a major role in this. Campbell’s opposition to dealer unions went beyond what one might term the call of his duty to his employers. Like all management consultants, Campbell identified with the interests of the men who paid him, and he saw labor-organizing campaigns as threats to those interests. In 1971 Campbell warned the NRA that casino organizing was an “industry-wide problem.” If dealers won the right to grievance procedures comparable to those of union employees, he cautioned, management “would, in the process, lose many of [its] rights to manage the operation and control [its] employees.” To avoid this, Campbell urged resorts to improve the wages and working conditions of dealers and to make sure they were protected against “capricious or unjust disciplinary action.”87
The opposition of management, however, was only one reason for the failure of dealer unionization. Unions, would-be-unions, and the leaders of both responded inadequately to the challenges of organizing dealers. Among other deficiencies, they failed adequately to address the fears and uncertainties of many dealers concerning unionization, including concerns about how a dealers’ union would deal with a hostile management. They called dealers who opposed unions “bootlickers” and “traitors,” which hardly inspired them to rally to union banners. It is not possible to know the attitudes of all dealers, or even most typical dealers, to unionization, but it is apparent that many of them did not think in the collective terms necessary for union success. Some had more in common with casino managers than with union officials and preferred to distance themselves from unionized employees. Union activists never understood that many dealers liked their jobs, their supervisors, and their economic prospects. They failed to assure dealers that unionization would not threaten their tips, their “juice” to find better jobs, or their traditional means for influencing workplace outcomes. All too often, organizers made unrealistic promises about the benefits of organizing, and when organizing campaigns collapsed, they disappeared. In short, the labor movement in Las Vegas and Nevada made an unrealistic assessment of not only the dealers’ situation but also of its own ability to challenge employers determined to crush unionization through intimidation and temptation.88
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