Union to Vote on Strike in Vegas

Saying their workloads have climbed to intolerable levels, Las Vegas hotel housekeepers, supported by thousands of hotel and casino co-workers, are likely to vote today to authorize a citywide strike.

Both sides acknowledge tensions are high in negotiations between gambling moguls and national union leaders, and today’s union vote at a university arena is expected to be packed and emotional. The current five-year contracts with various hotel groups expire May 31.

A strike by the 48,000-member Culinary Workers Union, which also represents kitchen help, coin changers, porters and other service workers, could cripple the resort city just as it recovers from a severe post-Sept. 11 tourism slump.

“There’s a lot of pressure on everybody right now,” said Alan Feldman, a spokesman for MGM Mirage Inc., the biggest operator on the Strip. “If a strike vote is affirmative, it’s going to raise the stakes very quickly.”

The Culinary Workers, affiliated with the national Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, has been a model of organizing and partnering with management in recent years. As the city reinvented itself over the last decade, the union also grew; it now represents about 90% of workers on the Strip.

But labor-management relations quickly deteriorated after the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, when tourism plummeted and resorts quickly laid off workers. For example, MGM Mirage, which owns major resorts on the Strip including the Bellagio and Treasure Island, sent home 6,000 of its 41,300 workers the week after the attacks.

But Feldman said the company had no choice. “Our business dropped 50% almost overnight,” he said. “This notion that the layoffs were too fast and too deep is ignorant of the reality.”

The union, however, says that employers have been pushing workers, particularly housekeepers, to speed up the pace for several years, and that they took advantage of the crisis to accelerate that trend. Union officials also said hotels have been slow to rehire as business rebounded.

“It’s all about getting more work with less workers,” said D. Taylor, the union’s top officer in Las Vegas. “There’s no question about it. All of our workers are feeling the strain now.”

The September layoffs and shift reductions created another crisis central to these negotiations: They drained the union’s health insurance plan, which is funded by employer contributions based on wages. Benefits are maintained for four months after a layoff.

To balance the fund, some employers want workers to contribute to their insurance plans. But free family health insurance has been a union hallmark in Las Vegas, defended in two previous strikes, in 1984 and 1990. “We’ve sacrificed wage gains some years to keep that benefit, and we’re not about to give it up now,” Taylor said.

Taylor has said the union is not asking for wage increases in light of increased health-care costs.

If workers authorize the strike as expected, union officials said they will take their message directly to tourists on the Strip. On Friday, they plan to set up television sets on sidewalks where passersby can view a union-produced video decrying high housekeeping workloads. In the short segment, workers complain of cleaning as many as 14 suites a day, many of them filthy with remnants of all-night parties and large numbers of guests.

That’s just the sort of tactic employers are dreading. “We’ve had 18 years of uninterrupted labor cooperation,” said Feldman of MGM Mirage. “In that time, we’ve seen a period of unprecedented growth that has benefited both labor and management. We need to keep that in mind as our objective. Both of us have too much at risk not to.”