Members of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 waiting to hear from U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su in the Palazzo Thursday morning. (Photo: Dana Gentry/Nevada Current)
For a quarter of a century union workers have steered clear of the Venetian Resort and later, its sister property, Palazzo, declining to set foot in the two non-union properties on the Las Vegas Strip.
Shortly after its opening, Venetian founder and CEO Sheldon Adelson declared the sidewalks of the Las Vegas resort private property in an effort to keep away Culinary union protestors, including 1,300 workers joined by U.S. Rep. John Lewis in Feb. 1999.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the sidewalks belonged to the public, not Adelson.
Now, under the ownership of Apollo Global Management, which along with real estate investment trust Vici Properties purchased the hotels for $6.25 billion in Feb. 2022, a year after Adelson’s death, Culinary Local 226 is celebrating the end of an era and the dawn of an all-union Strip.
Earlier this month, some 4,000 Venetian and Palazzo hospitality workers overwhelmingly voted in favor of contracts with AGM.
“I have been going around the country and celebrating first contracts,” Secretary of Labor Julie Su said during an interview Thursday, before speaking to Culinary members gathered at the Palazzo. “Especially in places where workers have been engaged in long struggles for a voice on the job, for better working conditions, for some of what President Biden calls breathing room in their lives.”
Considering the protracted battle between the hotels’ former ownership and the union, Su praised the speed with which AGM and the Culinary negotiated a four-year contract after the union and management reached a card-check neutrality agreement in July.
“It should not take more than a year to negotiate a first contract. If it does we’ve got problems, and oftentimes that delay is used to punish workers for choosing to join a union, and we should not allow that to happen,” she said, adding she’s challenged employers and unions to reach initial agreements within a year..”This certainly fits the spirit of that, although this has been a decades-long battle for the workers themselves, and I’m here to acknowledge and honor that as well.”
‘Anti-immigrant, anti-worker’
The union represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Southern Nevada, many of whom are immigrants, including an unknown number who are undocumented.
Statewide, 9% of workers are undocumented, the largest share in the nation.
Former Pres. Donald Trump is promising the mass deportation of immigrants – undocumented as well as those with temporary protected status – should he win the November election.
A Scripps News/Ipsos poll released this week found more than half of those polled (54%) said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support Trump’s deportation policy, including 86% of Republicans 58% of independent voters, and 25% of Democrats.
U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su preparing to address Culinary workers at the Palazzo Thursday. (Photo: Dana Gentry/Nevada Current)
Su questions the accuracy of the poll’s results. She also doubts whether the respondents are aware of the implications of mass deportation to the economy and families.
Immigrant workers, she said, “do some of the hardest work in our economy. They make our economy run. They do the work in hotels like this and in restaurants. They pick our crops and build our homes. They should not be exploited on the job and should not be vilified by politicians.”
Mass deportations could be devastating to Nevada’s immigrant-reliant economy. The state has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation at 5.4%, behind Washington D.C. at 5.5%. Nevada’s labor force participation rate climbed to 63% in July, but is still down from its pre-pandemic high of 64.5%, according to the Department of Labor.
“Workers, regardless of their immigration status, are protected by the labor laws in this country for a reason. It’s not only the right thing to do, if you create a whole group of workers who are vulnerable because of their status, it increases exploitation,” she told the Current. “It just creates a group of people who are so vulnerable to abuse of any kind, and rhetoric, or a plan of mass deportation, feeds into that.”
Su says Trump’s plan is not only anti-immigrant, it’s anti-worker. His rhetoric, she says, has “been hateful, and it’s been racist, and there’s no place for that in our workplaces or our communities. That kind of rhetoric feeds it and fans it.”
‘Opportunity infrastructure’
Working people, she says, “are in a moment, not by accident, but because this administration has been so focused on putting workers first, and putting the economy where workers do well.”
“By supporting the right to organize, we’re seeing workers gain more power in the workplace,” she said, and that in turn is helping to drive “a record recovery from the pandemic and it’s creating more prosperity all around.”
While billions of dollars pour into communities via the Biden administration’s Investing in America agenda, Su says she’s focused on “opportunity infrastructure” and connecting people from all walks of life with good jobs by eliminating obstacles such as lack of transportation or child care.
In 2023, Congress funded more than $1 billion to train dislocated workers, $880 million for adult workers, and $927 million for youth, as part of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA).
Su notes the Biden administration is out to break the cycle of poverty resulting from the low pay of in-demand jobs such as cashier, cook, and home care worker – jobs traditionally held by women, people of color and immigrants.
“When I first came to the Department of Labor, WIOA dollars were systematically resulting in Black workers being placed in jobs that paid less than their counterparts. We set about to address that,” she said, adding each state is now required to submit an equity data report.
“In this administration, we believe that every job should be a good job, and preferably a union job,” she said. “We’re creating the pathways to get to them.”