In honor of the upcoming caucuses in Nevada, American Prospect is rerunning a great backgrounder on the role of labor unions on the Vegas strip. For those of you not wholly convinced of the power of unions to simultaneously transform the lives of average working men and women in this country and drive economic growth, you really should read this. Here's an excerpt:
Local 226 is probably the largest -- and surely the most remarkable -- local union in the United States. While most unions have been shrinking or struggling to hold their own over the past several decades, and while hotel union membership has declined from 16 percent of the hotel workforce in 1983 to 12 percent in 2000, Local 226 has grown by 30,000 members since its low point in 1988. It has done that by organizing virtually every hotel on the Vegas Strip, so that roughly 90 percent of the jobs in the city's major hotels are unionized. Considering that Nevada is a right-to-work state where employees can work in unionized workplaces without joining the union, this is a breathtaking achievement.
The key is "union density" -- the unionized share of total jobs in a local occupation or industry. The authors of the Russell Sage study conclude that hourly wages in the hotel industry are $3 higher in cities with high union density than they are in ones where it's low. Even in unionized cities, however, the authors write that the union effect is minimal on work schedules or career ladders for such dead-end jobs as housekeeping. "This industry doesn't focus on mobility," one hotel executive told Bernhardt, Dresser and Hatton. "We've done a really poor job of recognizing talent and building our own."But there's high density and then there's Vegas. Housekeepers in Las Vegas make $11.40 hourly; tipped hotel employees have a $9.60 hourly base wage, the highest in the land. At a time when draconian bottom-line pressures on most hotel chains have increased the number of rooms that housekeepers must clean, Local 226's contract last year actually reduced the number of rooms that housekeepers must attend to in many Strip hotels. And at the union's thriving culinary academy, funded entirely by contributions from the hotels, housekeepers can learn the skills to become cooks or servers -- and servers to become gourmet waiters or wine stewards, and gourmet servers and wine stewards to become sommeliers.
Nor is it only union members who benefit from the union's work. D. Taylor, the secretary-treasurer of Local 226, figures that when you add in the workers at nonunion Vegas hotels that have to match the wage levels at unionized hotels, and the families of all these hotel employees, the total number of people whose living standards have been raised is 175,000 to 180,000 (and that's not counting the merchants and workers at whose stores the hotel employees shop). In a metropolitan area of 1.4 million, that means the union has transformed the entire city.
As the article makes clear, getting to this point wasn't easy. It required serious compromise from both sides - labor and management. It also required serious sacrifice, including a 4+ year-long strike that put one anti-union casino out of business. But by the mid-1990s things had begun to reach balance, and as they say, the rest is history.
Although the article doesn't include any direct evidence for this (for the mayor's take on this, see below), I can't help but think that it isn't a coincidence that the union movement took hold in the moments just before the Vegas strip underwent a renaissance. One of the most important programs run by the union is their Culinary Training Academy, a school that trains thousands of workers each year for new careers in the industry. This program isn't just good for the workers - it trains nearly 2,500 people each year - but casino owners have asked the union to double that number. And why not? Rather than hire untrained, uncommitted workers, they can get professionally trained, fully committed workers looking for a long-term career. It's a win-win situation. Here's a bit on the program:
This May, the academy moved its digs to the new Nevada Partnerships complex in North Las Vegas, a café au lait- colored group of buildings perched atop a hill and set off against the brilliant blue desert sky. The looks can be a bit deceiving; as Horsford points out, the African American neighborhood in which the school is situated has 15 percent unemployment, and the academy spends a good deal of effort recruiting young people from the area for its entry-level classes.
The entry hall is taken up largely by a dining room, where a class in busing tables is under way when I enter, and a class in serving is taking place when I leave. As events would have it, I tour the school on Wednesday, the day that its one and only 45-week course is held. This is its famous sommelier class, initiated in 1997 and still taught by Angelo Tavernaro. One of the 53 certified master sommeliers in the world, Tavernaro was in charge of wines at Caesar's Palace for 20 years and founded the wine cellar at the Rio.Tavernaro's students are a testament to the union's -- and Tavernaro's -- vision and determination. There's Mike, who was hired to bus tables at the Luxor 10 years ago. Through courses at the academy, he moved up the ladder to server, waiter in a gourmet restaurant and now wine steward. There's Diane, who eight years ago went to the union to see about getting a job in wine and now counsels Caesar's Palace patrons who want the proper bottle for their room-service dinners. The union said, "'You can do this!'" she recalls.
Today's course is on the wines of Australia, and Tavernaro, who's provided his students with reams of handouts and numerous wines to taste, proceeds region by region, valley by valley, vineyard by vineyard, noting soil composition, annual rainfall, temperature variance and their effects on flavor, acidity and much else. It's a lot of material to master, and it comes interspersed with lessons in history, marketing and philosophy. Shiraz, he notes, was originally developed in the ancient Persian city of the same name, and was brought to Australia more than a millennium later by Silesian immigrants who settled in the warm (like Persia) Barossa Valley. Some Vegas high rollers, Tavernaro points out, may not really have all that much money and just want to impress their friends, so he customarily begins by recommending the cheapest of his great wines, not the bottles going for $4,000. Until the past few decades, he laments, for the mass of Americans, "Wine has historically been not something to drink but get drunk with." This Tavernaro attributes to "the Puritan influence," words he spits out as if tasting the foulest of merlots.
And this isn't just about Vegas, of course. There are lessons that can be learned here for the entire country. Like this:
If the example of Local 226 demonstrates anything, it's that union density is the most sweeping and effective -- and likely the only -- way to bring middle-class income, stability and security to the lives of otherwise low-wage service-sector workers and their communities. In a globalized economy, even high levels of unionization in manufacturing industries such as auto and steel have been unable to protect workers from seeing their jobs shipped abroad and having to take lower-paying jobs in their stead. But with the continuing shift to a service-sector economy, the number of workers whose jobs cannot be exported -- from sales clerks and cashiers to janitors, servers and housekeepers -- continues to grow.
Yet the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy has occurred during (and contributed to) a period of union weakness, a period in which many unions have forgotten how to organize. The success of HERE and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in organizing and winning decent living standards for hotel workers and janitors remains more the exception than the rule within the labor movement. What sets HERE and the SEIU apart is their relentless focus on increasing their density in local markets and their ability to convert themselves into unions where rank-and-file stewards address the needs of the current members while the staff is freed up to devote all its time and resources to organizing.The consequences of that transformation are plainly visible in Vegas. UNLV economist C. Jeffery Waddoups has compared the hotel industries in Nevada's two major gambling centers, concluding that the median wage for hotel work in Vegas is 40.2 percent higher than in nonunion Reno. The union in Vegas has also narrowed the disparity between white and Hispanic living standards. (Local 226 is 43 percent Hispanic, 41 percent white.) Fully 81 percent of non-Hispanic and 78 percent of Hispanic hotel and gaming employees in Vegas have job-based health insurance, a level of parity not found in other sectors of the local economy. Among Vegas construction workers, for instance, 70 percent of non-Hispanic workers have such coverage, while just 41 percent of Hispanic employees do.
The union, then, has not directly transformed working-class Las Vegas outside its own industry. But in its effect on the city as a whole, says Jan Jones, who was mayor from 1991 through 1999 and now handles public affairs for the Harrah's chain, "It's made a remarkable difference." Local 226 "ensured that the employees were earning a living wage, and could buy cars and homes."
In Jones' first year as mayor, Vegas had 15 million visitors annually; when she stepped down eight years later, it had 36 million. Housing construction boomed, and the electorate felt economically secure enough to approve bond measures for parks, libraries and schools -- enabling the city to build a new school every month. Voters also passed a sales-tax increase to double the city's water capacity. "This is what management and labor working together can produce -- a vibrant economy," says Jones.
One of the major problems with the union movement in the US is that it has far too often been unwilling to adapt and change. Some of that has been due to structural problems - our system is much more balkanized than other advanced industrialized nations, for example - but some of it has been the fault of unions themselves. But there is a new breed of unions out there, and for them the future looks bright.
Will union turnout make a difference in this weekend's caucuses? We'll see....
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