Inside Asian Gaming

July 2009 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 41 Special Feature salivating at the prospect of this fairly large group of employees to unionize,” Kirsanow said. “Even with the defeat of the card-check measure, there is a fair possibility that some version of the act will make it extremely easy to organize, and unions would fairly aggressively assert those rights.” Sketchy past, uncertain future “Unions have obviously been on a 50-year slide, and casinos, at least the casino floor, had not traditionally been fertile ground for them,” said Bill Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno. He and other industry watchers say part of the reason it is so difficult to get a read on the labor picture within gaming is because each big push onto casino floors seems larger than the previous one, and are often in new markets. Even in established jurisdictions the ground shifts. Atlantic City, now the target of a consortium of unions, has since 1982 largely avoided attempts to organize. Eadington says Nevada’s labor history has been bifurcated, with Vegas on one hand and the rest of the state on the other. “Northern Nevada was just inherently more conservative. But in the gaming industry Bill Harrah was very anti-union. His approach was, ‘I will provide a working environment and working rules that would make it virtually impossible for unions to do better.’That was very unusual in its day. …Thirty years ago in Las Vegas there was a lot of cynicism with labor. In the ’70s unions were seen as somewhat corrupt, and there was a general sense that dealers did not want [representation], because of their tips—that unions would interfere in that. This was before the IRS wrote new rules on tips; but even after that, dealers tended to be, by reputation anyway, not joiners as much.” But maids? Maids are joiners. So are cocktail waitresses and dishwashers and fry cooks and bell hops. As members of Culinary Workers Union Local 226, an affiliate of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International, their ranks wreaked havoc on several casino-hotels from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. In 1984, Las Vegas was the scene of a citywide strike in which most hotels settled after two months of picketing. For the holdouts the strike continued beyond a full year, to the detriment of the union, which lost a half-dozen or so properties as a result. In a March 1996 article in The New Yorker one organizer was quoted as saying, “Most workers assumed that it was the beginning of the end of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas.” Significant strikes occurred after union contracts were renegotiated again in 1989. Binion’s Horseshoe suffered a 10-month walkout. And on Sept. 21, 1991, the longest successful hotel strike in U.S. history began at the New Frontier on the Las Vegas Strip, when hundreds of workers represented by four locals stopped work. It did not end until October 1997 when billionaire Phil Ruffin stepped in to buy the property. The workers finally returned in February 1998 after Ruffin took possession. Despite these actions, “The union issue had really been a secondary issue for quite some time,” even for the large publicly owned companies that operate in multiple jurisdictions, Eadington said. He said therewas still a belief that if you’reworking in the gaming industry “You can come in at a given skill level, and it puts you at a higher pay level, which again is a deterrent for unionization.” Well beyond Nevada, though, that mindset seems more and more a thing of the past, as organized labor seeks out new ways to become a more significant force in the industry. The success of the United Auto Workers at organizing dealers at four Atlantic City casinos was unprecedented (although as of this writing the UAW had not reached contracts with any of them). The UAW’s move into Indian Country at Connecticut’s Foxwoods Resort Casino, the biggest tribal casino of them all, was also seen