Union on a roll in Vegas

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 27, 1998 | by Timothy Burn

The American labor movement has drawn a line in the sand in the desert boomtown of Las Vegas, throwing its weight behind a multimillion-dollar effort to organize everyone from cocktail waitresses to bricklayers. The AFL-CIO has put unprecedented financial and strategic support into local union efforts at city hotels, casinos, construction sites, grocery stores and hospitals.

"There are really two ways to look at the Las Vegas strategy," says labor consultant Ray Abernathy. "if it can work in Las Vegas, it can work anywhere. Then again, if it doesn't work in Las Vegas, then it won't succeed anywhere else."

Las Vegas has been on a roll in recent years as the strong national economy fueled spending by Americans with a taste for its diversions. With money pouring in, the city has become a prime destination for people looking for work. More than 5,000 people move into Clark County each month, making southern Nevada the third fastest-growing region of the country.

National labor leaders view these new arrivals as the key to the future of American labor. The stakes are huge. Labor analysts say the campaign will test the effectiveness of AFL-CIO President John Sweeney's long-term goal of reversing the decades-long decline in membership, now hovering just below 13 million members.

So far the drive has shown some successes, earned by the grass-roots efforts of the Culinary Workers Union, the city's most powerful union with more than 40,000 members and growing, which late last year settled the nation's longest-running strike by 550 employees of the Frontier Hotel and Casino. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO is spearheading a campaign to organize the city's 25 different construction and trade unions, which in the past often have fought among themselves for members.

"Las Vegas is an example of what has to happen at the local level to rebuild the labor movement in this country," says Chris Woods, deputy organizing director for the AFL-CIO. "Right now, Las Vegas is really the only place in America where a hotel maid can afford to buy a home. And that's because the unions have helped boost a maid's wage from the minimum to as much as $11 an hour."

But labor analysts say unions have a long way to go, not just in Las Vegas, but throughout the country to reverse the decline. According to Abernathy, unions need to add at least 400,000 new members each year just to offset the number of people quitting or retiring.