The Sanders campaign invested hundreds of staff and volunteers into Las Vegas for many months, but the margins by which Sanders won working class and Latinx support should be understood not only as a victory for campaign organizers, but as a result of working class organization and consciousness that existed before Bernie’s local volunteers launched his campaign in 2016. While Culinary members did not follow the political direction of their union leadership in the caucuses in 2020, it is, ironically, the union as an institution that most made this victory possible.
The Culinary is an unusually successful institution that has built power on the shop floor for marginalized workers and led its members to take on global corporate interests by engaging in some of the largest and longest strikes and picket lines in contemporary labor movement history. Since the late 1980s, it has centered the struggles of immigrant women and African Americans who work as housekeepers and in other “back of the house” jobs in the casinos, picketing by the thousands and winning demands such as limits on how many dirty rooms per shift can be assigned, employer-provided meals on the job, employer-paid healthcare and a defined benefit pension plan. It has established what is known as the “Strip standard” for workers through strategic and difficult strikes, militant organization, and many sacrifices by workers.
Many new socialists have put blood, sweat and tears into political campaigns of insurgent candidates on the Democratic ballot line since Bernie’s 2016 primary run, and there has been an ongoing debate on the left about the nature of the Democratic party and whether it can be reformed or broken up. The 2020 Nevada caucus win illustrates two things:
- Workers who already know how to fight for someone they do not know are much better at winning elections than most workers with the same class interests, beliefs, and aspirations; and
- The workplace is a key arena for learning how to fight the political establishment as a proxy for the boss.
We should consider Culinary’s history as evidence that enacting policies like single payer healthcare will not happen without workplace struggle and organization on a mass scale before politicians will deliver meaningful policy changes.
Fortress Unionism
In recent years the Culinary has organized thousands of new members on and off the strip through NLRB elections at Station Casinos, an extremely anti-union employer with record numbers of labor law violations. While it is often written about as a “political powerhouse” during election season – a reputation that it actively cultivates in the press – its GOTV prowess relies on placing dozens of its members on union payroll for door knocking during key elections, a significant investment in foot soldiers for candidates. This is only possible because of its strength at the bargaining table. The political influence it has cultivated has made it a formidable junior partner to the largest employers in the state. This is demonstrated not only by victories getting its own members elected to the state legislature and to Congress, but also by helping curtail new taxes on the gaming and hospitality industry. Nevada is a low-tax state, with no personal income tax, and public schools ranked near the bottom. The lack of public funding for social services, schools, public health, and other infrastructure in Nevada is exacerbated by the fact that corporate influence on state politics is consolidated among a handful of gaming and mining companies.
At the same time, it is undeniable that the union has fought hard and created good jobs, particularly jobs for marginalized workers in poor communities, over many decades. A middle class job in a casino can be had without a college degree in Las Vegas. Class mobility exists despite underfunded public schools because tipped workers on the Strip have the highest wages of any in the country.
The fortress union at Culinary has been seriously under construction since the 1980s. The union went through a series of difficult defensive strikes in the 1970s. The employer attempt to bust the union continued through the 1980s. In 1984, over 17,000 members went on strike for nine months, 900 were arrested, and six casinos didn’t sign contracts. The international sent organizers to help rebuild the local. In 1990 Hattie Canty, a maid in the Maxim casino, became the first African American and woman to lead the union. She led it through its most significant period of growth as the gaming industry became more corporate and dominated by Wall street-backed firms. The union began picking strategic fights and winning.
Career Jobs
Racial segregation in casino jobs was still prevalent in the early 1990s, with many Black and Latinx workers stuck in lower paid “back of the house” jobs with no career opportunities. The predominantly African American community in Las Vegas on the Northwest side had high unemployment even when the Strip was booming. Canty started the training academy in a small kitchen in the Days Inn in downtown Las Vegas, determined to create a path to good union jobs. It is worth reading the oral history of her time as a union leader, and her journey from Alabama to Las Vegas. The Culinary Academy is now an enormous operation (funded through an hourly assessment paid by casino employers according to collective bargaining agreements, and managed by a joint labor-management trust) with wrap-around services. Workers and community members can attend and get trained to work in a large casino, receive English lessons, childcare, and more.
Healthcare
Having an exceptionally good health plan that hourly workers can afford to use attracts workers to the union and keeps them motivated during what can be very long campaigns and strikes. The health fund was established in the 1960s and pre-dates the pension plan. It provides some of the best access to healthcare in the country at low or no cost to workers, including its clinic and free pharmacy.
The local union’s existential fight in recent years has not been with MGM or Caesars, but with Station Casinos, a large off-strip chain of resorts with both a local customer base and a convention business. Recently Station Casinos Red Rock Resort, which has been an organizing target of the union for decades, announced that it would be making its HMO health plan premium-free and deductible-free just days before the union election was scheduled to happen. The Culinary lost the vote 627 to 534. They are challenging the results and have filed unfair labor practices. The union has already won elections at several other Station Casino properties leading up to this loss, so it was particularly notable escalation of union-busting. That painful loss, tied directly to the issue of the health plan, happened in December 2019, just before the primary began to heat up there.
Orientation and Hiring Hall
Internally, health plan enrollment has become a very important tool for recruiting and retaining members in an open-shop state, and the union has maintained over 80 percent membership consistently over the years. Newly hired workers at union casino properties attend orientation in the union hall in order to enroll in health benefits. This is a key point of contact for organizing, where the history of the union and the contract standards are introduced. Orientation also acts as a hiring hall for people seeking work. A more common arrangement in U.S. unions is a union representative being given a few minutes at employer-run orientations for new hires.
Defending the Fortress
All of this – the health plan and clinics and pharmacy, the hiring hall, the training academy, home buyer programs, pension plan, the Strip standard for workload language and pay – is the impressive fortress the union has built for its members under the harsh physical conditions and economic pressures of the gaming industry and the austerity of the state. The members who have fought to protect it have a culture of organizing that is truly exceptional in the U.S. labor movement.
The need to defend the fortress has a conservatizing effect on the leadership because of the inward focus and the necessary relationship with capital and the political establishment. Social demands like single payer healthcare are viewed as Trojan horses. The leadership understands that electoral politics (especially when driven by a GOTV operation in a two-party system) is an unstable source of power. For example, the union was an early endorser of Obama in 2008, but then had to fight tooth and nail, before and after the ACA was signed into law, against the absurd neoliberal “Cadillac” tax his administration insisted on imposing on non-profit health plans.
The union membership experiences this partnership with capital and the political establishment in a much different way from the leadership and staff. Shop stewards confront the employer’s attempts to erode the contract, and at the same time they experience the power of being a part of an effective union on the shop floor. The members live both inside and outside the fortress, within immigrant communities of family and friends that do not have access to union health plans, high wages, or a social safety net. The union taught them they could take on big corporations and win.
As layoffs due to Covid-19 rolled through the entirety of the UNITE HERE membership in a matter of days, members in less unionized industries like hotels and food service suffered the most, while casino workers have been able to keep their health plan funded during the shut-down for now. After all, casino employers will need the Culinary’s skilled workforce when the Strip reopens, a labor force with training and completed background checks required by the state gaming commission.