Above photo: Striking hotel workers walk a picket line outside the hotel. Culinary Union.
In her 17 years as a guest room attendant, Isabel Gonzalez has scarcely had a moment’s rest.
Gonzalez is responsible for cleaning 15 hotel rooms per day—stripping dirty linens, taking out the trash, making beds, cleaning toilets, sweeping, mopping, and dusting—all in the span of 30 to 45 minutes per room.
Sometimes she can fill a garbage bag from one room alone, with liquor and juice bottles, bottle caps, and half-eaten food from the floor. When pets stay in the rooms, she must find the time to vacuum twice and carefully sponge fur from the suede chairs. Often, she says, workers fall behind schedule and forgo their lunch breaks to catch up.
For her trouble, more than a year into bargaining, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas was still proposing a $0 raise for the first three years of a five-year contract. That’s why Gonzalez and her 700 co-workers walked out in the Culinary Union’s first open-ended strike in 22 years.
“We’re not going to accept that. It’s a joke,” she said.
At a last-minute bargaining session on the eve of the strike, the company proposed moving up earlier the raises it had planned for years four and five. Still, the union says, once you factor in increasing benefits costs, the overall deal averages out to a raise of just 30 cents a year.
A High-Stakes Walkout
The union negotiated contracts for 50,000 members last year at resorts across the Strip and downtown. In all these contracts, workers won a common standard: a 10 percent wage increase in the first year, and a total of 32 percent in raises over the five-year contract. Virgin is the last holdout.
Real estate magnates have fought several vicious, protracted fights to beat back the union—and failed. It took the late GOP megadonor Sheldon Adelson 25 years and millions of dollars to defeat the union at his Venetian and Palazzo properties. His victory was short-lived: soon after his death in 2021, the properties were sold to an asset management firm that agreed to a card-check neutrality agreement, and workers promptly won their union. In August, members there voted 99 percent to ratify their first contract.
In the 1990s, workers at the hotel-casino Frontier embarked on one of the longest strikes in U.S. history, where more than 500 workers maintained a 24/7 picket line for six years before embattled owner Margaret Elardi sold off the property and workers won reinstatement.
Through years of struggle and sacrifice, workers have won a fully union Strip. Achieving this degree of union density has resulted in industry-leading standards, because it takes wages out of competition—the companies are all operating under a union contract.
But hotel magnates would love to push down wages and they will be watching the Virgin fight for any indication that a Vegas hotel can get away with breaking the pattern. As journalist Hamilton Nolan wrote, “There is just too much money and too many cutthroat capitalists in Las Vegas who would love to drive down labor costs for the union to ever rest.”
Virgin Hotels Las Vegas maintains that because it is an off-Strip hotel, the union’s economic demands are untenable, even though the union reached agreements with multiple off-Strip properties months ago. The contract expired in June of 2023, and there has been little movement at the bargaining table since. The paltry last-minute adjustments were too little, too late.
“I think we deserve a lot more than that,” said Andro Rodriguez, who has worked as a cook at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas for the past year in addition to his work at an on-Strip resort. “There’s a big difference in what we make at the Strip and what we make over here, when we’re doing the same job.”
Solidarity Forever?
No one expects billionaire investors to be on the right side of a labor dispute. A union, though, is different. Among the small number of other investors who own Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is the Laborers Union Pension Fund of Eastern and Central Canada.
“It was definitely a shock… that there was a labor union that was our owner,” said Pamela Holmes, a lead usher who helps guests buy tickets and find their seats at the hotel’s events.
After other efforts to contact the pension fund failed, Holmes and her colleagues went to the fund’s office in Toronto in hopes of talking worker to worker. “We went to the Laborers Union and were stopped by security,” she says. They were told that no one was available, but that security would take down their information. “We were there about four days and we never heard back from them.
“We went there hoping they weren’t doing it on purpose,” she said, “but it just seems like they knew and they didn’t want to talk to us.”
The pension fund has $8 billion in assets and an aggressive investment strategy. In an interview with the Canadian Business Journal, Laborers International Vice President Joseph Mancinelli said the union needed a higher return than the stock market had been providing, in order to cover the fund’s liabilities. So it has made multiple real estate investments.
“The Private Equity fund is doing somewhere around 14 percent to 15 percent as of now, but we think it has the potential to do even greater than that, and maybe above 20 percent,” he said. Among those investments is the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.
The pension fund did not respond to a request for comment.
No Longer Intimidated
Today, Holmes is on the bargaining committee and is a leader in her department. But she wasn’t always sure about the union: “I was on the fence,” she says.
That started to change when she sought answers to the questions she and her colleagues had about the contract. They wanted to know what more could be done about safety on the job. Ushers were left scrambling to deal with everything from drunk, unruly guests to medical emergencies, because of a simple problem: too few radios.
“Some of the ushers inside don’t have them, so they have to go through security to get the leads to come and get to the guest,” she said. “We have medics on the property, but if we had more radios, they would get to the calls faster.”
Inconsistent hours are another significant concern. Shifts can range from four hours to eight, and on occasion, “there might only be five shows for the whole month,” she says. Like many of her co-workers, she works a second job to make ends meet: “A lot of employees that I work with have two or three jobs and they’re running from one job, literally they have five or 10 minutes to get to the next job,” she said. “It puts a toll on you.”
Gonzalez has seen firsthand the difference a union makes. She worked at the hotel when it was non-union, and felt “like a robot that just takes orders.” Management demands were arbitrary and unsympathetic: room attendants could be assigned extra rooms on a whim, or rooms on multiple floors without extra time to get from floor to floor: “A supervisor could come and make you clean 17 or 18 rooms.”
Now at this union hotel, “with my contract, it means I don’t have to do more than 15, and if they want to force or intimidate me, I can say, ‘My contract says this, this, and this.’” She can also put her children on her health care plan, something that was impossible with non-union wages.
The strike is well-timed: the Las Vegas Grand Prix auto race is set for November 21-23, when an anticipated 300,000 spectators will descend on the Strip. The hotel itself has a number of big-ticket performances in the coming weeks that could be disrupted, including the rock band Manchester Orchestra, and the Danish rock musician King Diamond. As the strike nears its second week, the hotel has moved to hire scabs.
In addition to a pay increase and health care improvements, Gonzalez would like to see restaurant workers in the building be able to join the union—a demand the union is fighting for in the form of card-check recognition, where an employer agrees to recognize the union once a majority of workers sign authorization cards. “They are also workers, and they work hard,” she said. “They deserve a contract.”