3
workers at the new Treasure Island and Luxor hotels joined the union’s ranks. In just four years, the
union increased its membership by 50% and, more importantly, unionized every new major hotel
that opened in the city. Since then, Culinary’s growth has continued at an equally impressive rate.
From the opening of the Mirage until 2003 they gained 30,800 members for a total membership of
50,000. Moreover, union density in the casino industry in Las Vegas stands at approximately 65%,
and density on the famous Las Vegas Strip, the heart of the city’s tourist-driven economy, is even
higher at 90%. Local 226’s string of organizing victories led AFL-CIO President John Sweeney to
declare Vegas to be the “hottest union city in America” during a visit in 1997.
4
The Culinary Union’s growth contrasts sharply with the fate of organized labor overall in the
U.S. Union density has not risen in any year for the last quarter century, and by 2003 it had fallen to
12.9% and an even more perilous 8.2% in the private sector.
5
A significant and growing portion of
the labor movement, alarmed by this erosion, has deliberately and steadily increased its efforts to
organize new members. The most visible marker of this renewed focus was the election of Sweeney
and the New Voice slate to the top leadership positions in the American Federation of Labor-
Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1995 on a platform enshrining organizing as
labor’s most important mission. Since then several unions have gone on to shift over 50% of their
budgets to organizing, and many more have invested substantial resources to try to increase their
numbers. Yet for all the effort, labor’s share of the workforce has continued to contract.
The reasons for this decline are by now well established. Unions face hostile employers and
inadequate labor laws as they try to organize, making the addition of new members a slow and
arduous task. Meanwhile, shifts in the U.S. economy away from areas of union strength have
exacerbated the difficulties labor faces in maintaining its share of the labor force. The biggest and
4
Quoted in Marc Cooper, “Labor Deals a New Hand,” The Nation (March 24, 1997), 11-12.
Convention