Connecting personal biography and social history: women casino workers and the global economy

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Dec, 2001 by Jill B. Jones, Susan Chandler

There are some crucial differences, however, between Nevada and other globalized work-sites. Las Vegas is the most highly unionized city in the nation, and the 50,000 member Culinary Workers Local 226 is a powerhouse. The history of organized labor in Las Vegas has been a colorful one, and in the early days, mob, entrepreneurial, and casino employee interests often intertwined. (For a long time, the Teamsters Pension Fund was the only place casino operators could go for money; Jimmy Hoffa made loans when banks refused to.) Those days are long gone, but undoubtedly are part of the reason for organized labor's anomalous strength in Las Vegas.

Culinary, like unions around the country, was shaken in the eighties by internal weaknesses, on the one hand, and the fierce assault on workers' right to organize and bargain collectively on the other. Determined to build a fighting and highly conscious local, leaders strengthened the Culinary Workers Health Fund, a benefit everyone was willing to fight for, and began organizing the increasingly immigrant work force--door-to-door. "One More Day" was the rallying cry of the six-year Frontier strike, a critical testing ground for the union. Rank and file workers, grown into experienced leaders, came away from the Frontier strike with a) the conviction that they could hold on "'til victory," and b) the skills to make it happen. Today, Culinary's strength is credited for driving up casino workers' wages in Las Vegas to a level that allows many of its members to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle, including home ownership and the ability to send their children to college (Christensen, 1995; Miller, 2000; Marsten, 1995).

But while 48% of casino workers in the Las Vegas hotel-casino industry are organized, only 1.5% are organized in Reno. Culinary is working hard to change the Reno situation, and there are some early victories. Nevertheless, Reno's workforce currently looks very much like the unorganized, disempowered workforces characteristic of most global work sites. The sharp contrast in labor's Nevada presence provides analysts with a good ground on which to make assessments of union contributions to workers' wages and benefits. Jeff Waddoups (1998), professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, compared casino wages in Las Vegas with those in Reno. Using the state wage survey conducted annually by the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (NDETR), Waddoups concluded that among highly unionized job categories (for example, maids, baggage porters, and kitchen helpers) Las Vegas workers made 40% more than their counterparts in Reno.

The Study

Saskia Sassen (1998) in her analysis of women workers within the global economy recommends the application of a broad range of critical perspectives to gain understanding of the complexity of women's lived experience. She says of her own work: "[It] is a mere beginning--an analytical stage on which we need to place the details contributed by ethnographic research, cultural critiques, sociological surveys, and legal scholarship on men and women in their many specific conditions and subjectivities" (p. 83).