Cover
story Organizing
By ARTHUR JONES
NCR Staff Las Vegas
Slot machines are the Wall Street of
the working class. Workers and retirees, that is. These days though, here in
Slots Capital, USA, its the other workers on The Strip -- those who keep
the casinos and hotels going -- who are catching attention.
In the past few years, labor protest and unionizing has become
such a feature of the Southern Nevada landscape that labor leaders now refer to
Las Vegas as the new Flint, Michigan. Flint --from the 1930s until
the 1950s -- was probably the most unionized city in the nation. Now Las Vegas
probably is.
NCR has taken Las Vegas as a case study to briefly examine
some of whats underway in a major counter-cyclical push, the return of
organized labor (see NCR, June 4).
In 1998 alone, nationwide almost 400,000 Americans joined unions, predominantly
in the service sector. (The offset was that as U.S. manufacturing changed or
shifted to south of the border, some 250,000 unionized manufacturing jobs were
lost.)
In the 1990s, union representation here has outstripped Las
Vegas/Clark Countys more than 20 percent population growth. For once
corporate America moved in on casinos and hotels (and the mob apparently moved
out) and began a casino-building frenzy, Las Vegas burnished its image as a
family place. (Still, the new mayor is a lawyer best known for his Mafia
clients.)
Forget the gamblers for a moment. For the working class family,
another price here is still right: housing. A thrifty hotel housekeeper on
union scale can buy a single-family home in a region where the median housing
sale price is only $119,000. Not surprisingly then, more than 40 percent of the
newcomers have flocked in from next door -- California where its 30
percent more expensive to live. But it isnt just in this booming gambling
mecca that the unionizing push is on. Evidence of low wages and new labor
pressures is everywhere. Where workers are concerned, somethings in the
air nationally. In a move that would have had Americas colonial governors
call out the redcoats, a 1998 protest march in Colonial Williamsburg, Va.,
slammed the low pay that supports that regions tourism.
Nationally, a family of four needs $32,000 annually to live.
Colonial Williamsburg wages range from $12,660 to $17,180. At UCLA in the West
and at Ivy League schools in the East, graduate students -- teaching assistants
who shoulder the work professors no longer undertake -- want to unionize. The
once-aloof medical profession in June watched the American Medical Association
form an all-doctors union.
Other victories
Organized labor has scored some other odd victories recently.
Stockholders at Oregon Steel Mills this year sided with a labor-backed
resolution to make it easier to oust the board of directors and end the secrecy
surrounding how the company conducts it business. In recent years, strikes are
more common -- including at airports, where its no longer unusual to see
uniformed airline pilots protesting long hours or low pay as they carry neatly
printed signs urging public support.
Few homemade signs could match 17-year-old Josh Whitmans
hand-lettered 1998 placard: Boycott McDonalds. On strike for better
staffing, wages and vacations. The Fairfax, Va., high school junior led
eight night-shift colleagues off the job to force the company to address issues
of long hours and low pay. McDonalds responded with a meeting at which
officials promised to fully staff busy shifts, conduct regular wage reviews and
post work schedules well in advance. The National Labor Relations Board was not
involved on Joshs behalf.
On the West Coast, immigrant restaurant workers in Los
Angeles Koreatown know the feeling. Last year they were marching to
protest the $600 a month they earn for 9-to-12 hour days, six days a week --
less than half the minimum wage. High on the complaint list were working
conditions -- from slippery floors to employer verbal abuse. But not all abused
employees find they can bring in the union. Hundreds of Guatemalan workers in
North Carolinas chicken-processing plants have been trying for years.
Overworked? In a Darien, Conn., hearing earlier this year
$9-an-hour nursing home workers said they had to wear roller skates on the job
to get to all the patients.
So, for all the high employment figures, there is unease.
Nationally there is the growing realization that working in America isnt
what it used to be or ought to be. The blue-collar class feels it worst, but
there is simmering white-collar resentment against exploitation in fields as
different as medical care, law and the airline industry.
Entrepreneurs may make computer billions, but all the computer
workers see is corporations in Washington opposing rules proposed by the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration to protect workers from
repetitive-action syndrome.
Other auguries: Despite the booming economy, the United States
still has the highest poverty rates and most unequal income distribution among
industrialized countries; projections suggest that 60 percent of todays
white 20-year-olds and 90 percent of all black 20-year-olds will fall below the
poverty line sometime during their lives. The real crunch, as Notre Dame
economics professor Teresa Ghilarducci notes, is that real wages have
fallen for 15 years and corporate profits have increased for the past
eight.
Unions are emerging as one answer to the exploitation, real wage
stagnation and unease. At the start of the 1990s, organized labor was still
mired in what Pittsburgh University economics professor Michael D. Yates calls
labors decline: internal forces, such as high living
officials not elected by the rank-and-file; collective bargaining far removed
from workers control (often resulting in sweetheart contracts
between union leaders and employers), and ties to the mob.
The worst unions, such as the Teamsters and many
construction unions, writes Yates in, Why Unions Matter (Monthly
Review Press, 1998) were run as dictatorships, complete with ruthless
violence against anyone who dared complain, and were infiltrated by criminal
elements who routinely raided union treasuries to finance casinos and other
underworld ventures.
When United Mine Workers reform candidate Joseph Yablonski
challenged UMW President Tom Boyle, Boyle actually had him
murdered. The worst of it all, from the workers perspective, says
Yates, is that the labor movement ceded control over the workplaces to
the employer. This was all practical stuff, far removed from the 1991
moral and ethical lesson Paterson, N.J., Bishop Frank J. Rodimer provided the
U.S. Senate Labor Subcommittee.
The role of unions in promoting the dignity of work and of
workers is very important in Catholic teaching, said Rodimer, and
the U.S. bishops in their 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for
All, pointed out that the way power is distributed in a free market
economy frequently gives employers greater power than employees in the
negotiation of labor contracts. Such unequal power may press workers into a
choice between an inadequate wage and no wage at all.
Rodimer said, I can tell you that there is no question that
labor unions in this country are weaker than at any time in my memory. Census
takers have found that the gap between rich and poor in the country is an
ever-widening chasm. It now takes two wage earners to support most families
with children, even with a lower standard of living than their parents
had.
In Las Vegas the following year, 1992, a huge crowd of strikers
outside one hotel and casino was suddenly swelled when 1,500 members of the
Service Employees International Union adjourned en masse from their nearby
convention to show support to striking workers. The strikers were men and women
who wanted the casino to permit a vote on whether the Culinary Union, the local
manifestation of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees union, could represent
them. The protest had been ongoing for years, and would continue. In the middle
of a crowd was labor priest Msgr. George Higgins. John Sweeney,
then SEIU president and now AFL-CIO President, saw Higgins in the crowd and had
his aides bring him to the convention platform where Jesse Jackson was winding
up a speech at fever pitch.
Settling for a prayer
A former professor and a U.S. Catholic Conference labor issues
staff member, Higgins was asked by Sweeney to speak next. When I got to
the microphone, Higgins recalled later, I told the crowd that when
I was a young boy my father had called me aside and warned me that some day I
would have to speak right after Jesse Jackson. Dont be a
fool, my father admonished me, Dont do it. Settle for a
prayer instead. And with that Higgins (see accompanying story)
encouraged the crowd to join in the Lords Prayer for the success of the
strike. The union -- which has a strong working relationship with the local
religious labor justice group (see NCR, June 4) -- nonetheless has
relied on more practical tactics than prayer alone during 15 years of local
organizing that has seen membership soar from 20,000 to 50,000. Las Vegas
isnt just casino workers and the Culinary Union.
Organizers like Jim Sala of the Carpenters union dug their
heels in more than a decade ago to try to change the face -- and pay scales --
of the construction work force. Sala explained that unionized construction
workers in Southern Nevada take home almost twice as much pay as non-unionized
labor, and have benefits on top of that.
Nevada is part of something else, too. In the early 90s, the
American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations developed
a Building Trades Organizing Project to bolster the unionization of
construction trades. BTOPs Las Vegas man is Bob Ozinga.
Collective bargaining, said Ozinga, is a peace
treaty between employers and workers. Organizing is all about creating an
environment in which a meaningful peace treaty can be negotiated. Success
for the Building Trades Organizing Project is when a company agrees to
recognize several buildings trades unions all at once. In June 1998 the local
Pete-White Eagle Concrete Co. agreed to recognize three unions -- carpenters,
laborers and plasterers, and concrete masons -- provided BTOP could get White
Eagles competitors to do the same.
Ozinga, who took on the Nevada BTOP directorship last year, said
that in the last two years the local building trades unions have grown
aggregately by more than 7,000 members -- a 35 percent increase. Over 300
employers -- contractors and subcontractors -- have signed collective
bargaining agreements.
Organizing is tough by its very nature, said the
Carpenters Sala, though in Las Vegas it helps that the union package is
almost double the non-union in value.
Non-union workers average $12 to $16 an hour, he said,
with little or no benefits. Union scale is higher, theres paid
family health care, two pension plans. What unionized building
contractors want most, he said, is a level playing field -- to prevent
non-union labor construction companies from underbidding them on projects.
Ozinga points to certain Las Vegas factors that conspire to
create the kind of growth unions are experiencing in the Las Vegas/Clark
County area. Theres a very healthy construction economy -- locally
that creates a very high demand for skilled labor -- some incumbent very strong
labor-management relationships, and the presence of a very large, visible and
militant organizing program, he said.
The local Las Vegas Business Press doubts that Las Vegas building
trades gains can serve as a national model. Writer Rob Bhatt contended last
year that Southern Nevadas relatively unique characteristics --
unprecedented casino expansion coupled with a modest cost of living -- have
made organizing possible.
But what are the major issues for the striking construction
workers?
Dignity and justice, said Ozinga. A feature of the
White Eagle strike were demands for toilet facilities and water at building
sites and breaks and lunch-times being honored. Its hard to get
passionate about an extra 25 cents an hour, he said, but difficult
not to when your human dignitys at stake.
The workers and the unions will dig in. During one 1998 strike,
the workers, overwhelmingly Latino, primarily non-union, stuck it out for five
months protesting unfair employers. From 4:30 and 5 a.m. onward, 10 hours a
day, six days a week, they protested. BTOP rallied nationwide support.
Babies were born. We had people to feed, foreclosures to avoid -- all the
things you could imagine in a community of 500 families. Having that number of
people in militant, non-violent motion at one time is unprecedented.
But the strike wasnt entirely successful. The two largest
employers among the seven being struck are today still unorganized,
said Ozinga, although theyre operating at 20 and 30 percent below
their former capacity. Sala and Ozinga agree that the construction unions
had lessons to learn. Fifty years ago, said Ozinga, 85
percent or more of all construction workers were union represented. Today
its only about 20 percent.
Part of the problem, say Sala and Ozinga, both members of the
United Brotherhood of Carpenters, was that construction unions formerly
operated like a guild. Apprentices and non-union members would be invited to
join and union jobs would be found for those who did. Contrast that with today,
when the 15 unions of the building trades target companies that are not
unionized, or they support non-union workers in their strikes in the hopes of
union representation to follow.
Theres activity galore, but no room for complacency.
In a holding pattern
Building trades unions nationally grew by 160,000 members in
1996-97. Last year the total hovered between a plateau and a slight decline.
This year, said Ozinga, were in a virtual holding pattern.
And whether theres an approaching holding pattern for revenues from the
building trades in Nevada is also a question -- like the one about the stock
markets potential decline -- only the future can answer. As more casinos
are built nationwide -- by Native Americans on their reservations, or in
economically ailing Mississippi River towns -- Nevadas competition
increases in the battle for the traveling gamblers buck.
In April, Forbes magazine reported that nearly one-half of
all growth in Las Vegas gambling revenues was from four Stations casinos
nowhere near The Strip. Our big challenge is the neighborhood
casinos, said the Culinary Unions man in Southern Nevada, D.
Taylor. Thats really five casinos, about 10,000 workers.
Taylor, who has been in Las Vegas since 1987, said the Culinary
Union has increased our market share and our percentage. Though the
union has lately picked up representation at two Hilton casinos in Reno, adding
a further 2,500 members, theres still plenty to do in organizing in Las
Vegas. The owner of the now-opening Venetian hotel and casino is flatly opposed
to the unions. Well have a big fight on, said Taylor.
The Culinary Union, said Taylor, basically gets its staff
from the rank-and-file. A lot of the people who built this union are still
members -- its not a third- or fourth-generation thing. I think
thats important.
And second, because we always have lots of fights, it never
allows us to be complacent, to feel like were legitimized. We always have
an edge to us. Like anything, if you allow the non-union to grow, stuff [such
as workers being able to buy their own homes] gets eradicated. Thats why
were always organizing, fighting.
Successful or not, its lonely being the only service sector
union in town. That has changed. The SEIU did more than hold their convention
and support someone elses strike in Las Vegas. They came back to
organize. Today, theyve turned the local health care industry into a
majority union industry with 4,700 members in the major local hospitals and a
further 1,500 members in city government.
Economically, Las Vegas is still booming. The never-ending stream
of tour buses with the next load of slot-players is fueling it. But it is
people like Nina McKnight, mother of two, who fuel the union boom. In May
McKnight left California for Las Vegas to find work. Two weeks later she was in
the Culinary Unions two-week housekeeper training program. Two weeks
after that came the job -- benefits and all.
National Catholic Reporter, September 3,
1999
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