2
“You see things in Las Vegas you won’t see anywhere else.” -- Glen Arnodo
I. Introduction: “Live better, work union”
Las Vegas is a place where cocktail waitresses can own their own homes and housekeepers
can send their children to college. It is perhaps the last place in America that can make such a claim.
The reason is as simple as it is rare: Las Vegas’s main industry, gaming, is highly unionized and the
local union, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees (HERE) Local 226,
1
has been strong
enough to win contracts with good wages, a guaranteed work week and what the New York Times
called “Rolls-Royce health coverage.”
2
Union waiters in Vegas make $10.14 an hour as a base wage,
the highest rate in the nation and more than three times the $3.30 an hour that most waiters in New
York City make.
3
Union consciousness runs strong and deep in Vegas; walk through the Culinary
Union (as Local 226 is known locally) parking lot and at any given time you’ll see several cars with
“Live better, work union” bumper stickers.
Las Vegas, in fact, is the biggest union organizing success story in the United States in the
last quarter century. A steady and significant growth in Culinary’s ranks, which has represented
casino workers in Sin City for decades, began in 1989. That was the year that the Mirage, the first of
the big mega-resorts that now dominate the Las Vegas Strip, opened, ushering in a new era in Vegas;
and it opened as a union hotel. The 3,300 Mirage employees who joined the union in 1989 were
followed by 2,100 workers at the Excalibur when it opened the following year. In 1993, some 4,400
1
HERE and UNITE (formerly the Union of Needlestrades, Industrial and Textile Employees) merged in
July 2004, forming a new union named UNITE HERE. The period covered in this study predates the
merger, so the paper refers to the union as HERE rather than UNITE HERE.
2
Steven Greenhouse, “Local 226, ‘the Culinary,’ Makes Las Vegas the Land of the Living Wage,” New
York Times (June 3, 2004).
3
Ibid.
Convention