Organized labor fears a rising nonunion workforce could pull restaurant jobs down from the middle class.
For all the glitz of the Las Vegas Strip — home of the Bellagio’s fountain and several faux Wonders of the World — one of Vegas’ true wonders often goes unremarked: It is a union town, with 60,000 hospitality and restaurant workers represented by the Culinary Workers Union. But as the city has come back after the pandemic, hosting this year’s Super Bowl and swing-state campaign workers, that wonder is showing signs of stress. Nonunion restaurants have crept onto the Strip over the last decade, and the union estimates that today there are 10,000 nonunion jobs. “It’s a huge problem for us,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union, also known as UNITE HERE Local 226.
Local 226 last summer took on one of organized labor’s monumental tasks: protecting and expanding union strongholds. The task is simple and immense. Immense, because it requires organizing those 10,000 workers across dozens of workplaces in an industry notoriously difficult to unionize. Simple, because so many nonunion workers now labor inside the same complexes where unions are already present.
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Last August, Lionel Guerrero was hauling trash bags out of Alexxa’s, a restaurant known for its creative cocktails and live music inside Paris Las Vegas, when he bumped into a woman wearing a union button. The organizer’s button was out of place at Alexxa’s, which is not unionized, but it might have appeared elsewhere at Paris Las Vegas. The complex, owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment, has been unionized since opening in 1999. But Caesars leased a restaurant space to local restaurateur JRS Hospitality, which opened Alexxa’s in 2018. Guerrero started washing dishes there soon after.
Guerrero, 58, still washes dishes at the restaurant — and earns $16 an hour. Care covered by the health insurance Alexxa’s provides is too expensive to use, he said. He had brightened when he saw the organizer. “A union would be good here,” he told her. “Why don’t we do it?”
Other workers inside Paris Las Vegas were among the 40,000 union members celebrating a five-year contract signed with three casinos in November that included raises of 32% over the period. Today, union members earn an average of $28 an hour, including benefits; by the end of the contract in 2028, wages will average about $37 an hour.
The same divide has emerged at other workplaces along the strip’s 4.2 miles, Pappageorge said. At the unionized Park MGM Las Vegas complex, an outpost of Eataly, the high-end food court originally launched by celebrity chef Mario Batali, opened with nonunion workers in 2018. At Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, a union workplace, the comfort-food-focused Citizens Kitchen & Bar opened without a union in 2013.
On the Strip and beyond, new nonunion restaurants have opened in high-end malls or as free-standing eateries. Labor organizers worry that this nonunion expansion — which lowers union density — will undermine the union’s ability to keep Vegas restaurant jobs in the middle class. “Density is about power,” Pappageorge said. With union workers at every casino along the Strip, employers have little choice but to deliver living wages and generous benefits — commonplace here, but rare for most of the industry, where annual wages, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, average about $27,700.
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According to the National Restaurant Association, roughly half of the country’s restaurant workforce is made up of people of color, and recent data from the Department of Labor shows that only 1.4% of workers in “food services and drinking places” — a category that includes full-service restaurants and fast food — belong to a union. “Restaurant work is a real epicenter for what we call precarious labor,” said Eli Wilson, a sociologist and assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, who has studied restaurant workers. “The work is deeply insecure, and it often pays low wages, with workers exposed to a fair amount of workplace harassment.”
The union’s initial goal is to organize leased-out restaurants at union casinos, such as Alexxa’s, Eataly and Citizens. If organizers succeed, they’ll move on to the growing number of nonunion restaurants cropping up along the Strip. The strategy is made possible by a provision in the new contracts. Previous agreements barred the union from supporting labor activism among nonunion workers at otherwise organized casinos — in effect putting up a wall between the two groups. November’s agreement knocked that wall down, giving the union’s veritable army of workers the right to organize neighboring workers to join their ranks.
“There was very clear resistance from every company,” said Pappageorge about the new provision. “When companies sign a contract, what they expect is labor peace. That’s what they are buying.” The upshot was that a company such as Caesars, having just agreed to provide major wage increases and other concessions, could still see a boisterous picket line of both union and nonunion members in front of Paris Las Vegas, one of its flagship properties. The target would be Alexxa’s, of course, but the headache would be shared.
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On a recent weekday morning, the outdoor dining section of Alexxa’s was already crowded. Though it was just 10 a.m, a number of brunch goers looked to be well into their exploration of the restaurant’s $30 bottomless mimosas not far from a man covered in blankets along the sidewalk. Towering 541 feet above the restaurant was a half-size replica of the Eiffel Tower, the landmark of Paris Las Vegas, constructed from 5,000 tons of steel at the cost of $28 million.
José de Jesús Zúñiga has worked at Alexxa’s for about three years and has spent his entire restaurant career in nonunion kitchens. At 58, he looks a decade younger, with unlined skin and a clean-shaven face. “I never thought I’d get involved with the union,” he said. But a struggle last year to get paid overtime helped push him to become a leader in the union organizing campaign. “I see the union as a chance to help us solve our problems,” he said. “And economically, it would be big.” Like Guerrero, Zúñiga earns $16 an hour.
Since he went public in support of the union last summer, Zúñiga said he feels that he has been targeted by management. A week after wearing a union button to work, he said that he was written up for clocking in early — something he had done often before without incident. Then he was demoted from chef’s assistant to dishwasher. “It’s been very hard, exhausting, stressful,” he said with a sigh. That fall, he went to the hospital emergency room only to learn he’d had an anxiety attack.
In response to the union drive, JRS Hospitality hired Labor Information Services, the same consulting firm used by Amazon to combat union organizing. According to Department of Labor records, LIS was hired to hold meetings with workers to “discuss the realities of signing authorization cards.” In September, the union filed two National Labor Relations Board complaints accusing JRS of interrogating, threatening and disciplining workers who are engaged in union activities — a violation of federal law.
JRS Hospitality did not respond to multiple requests for comment about working conditions at Alexxa’s and allegations from workers and the union about retaliation. The labor complaints remain open.
Despite the resistance from management, nonunion workers like Guerrero and Zúñiga are hopeful about the future and take comfort in knowing that the union — including union members who work throughout Paris Las Vegas — has their back.
One of those unionized workers is Mary Check, who has been a union member since the casino’s restaurants opened in 1999. For Check, the union has been a source of support, especially after her husband developed cancer 12 years ago. A rare tumor in his jawbone required 20 surgeries, including removal of his jaw. Her union insurance, which carried no premium or deductible, covered all of it.
“Everyone should have what we have,” Check said. “A chance to have a better life for their families, to be stronger and more confident.” Check, who said she knew just about everyone at Paris Las Vegas, said she could see the difference in how workers carried themselves at Alexxa’s. “You see how they’re struggling; you see how they’re weighed down.” Her message to them is the same she shares with her fellow union members. “I’ll be with you. Anytime you need me, I’ll be there. And isn’t that nice to have someone there for you?”
Copyright 2024 Capital & Main.
Illustration by Tevy Khou.