Las Vegas, Blue-Collar City in a Purple State

Photo: John Locher Archives Associated Press Members of the Culinary Workers Union block traffic along the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 25, 2023, in an effort to win new union contracts.

Stéphane Baillargeon in Las Vegas, Nevada

Published at 12:00 am

• United States

The United States presidential election in a few weeks will be played out in a handful of swing states, including Nevada and Arizona, where the Republican and Democratic candidates remain neck and neck. The series offers a political journey through these areas of fierce struggle. Second case of Las Vegas, a city of blue collar workers.

The bungalow on Bracken Avenue in the southern section of downtown Las Vegas looks a bit like a junkyard with its four more or less stripped-down cars, a chair, a table, a tire, a stump, and piled-up building materials. The temperature of God’s oven, exceeding 40 degrees at the end of September, amplifies the vaguely post-apocalyptic impression.

Yolanda Garcia and Martha Lastre, two unionized Democratic activists, knock on the door, wait, wait, knock again. Two union photographers capture the scene. Suddenly, Gilberto appears and starts a political conversation in Spanish.

Retired from a maintenance job in a large hotel, he is registered to vote. His two children, young adults, have not yet registered to vote. A flyer from the vice president is already lying on his door, under the foot of a stepladder. The conversation quickly turns to the subject of abortion, legal in Nevada up to the 24th week of pregnancy. Gilberto is worried about it.

Photo: Courtesy Yolanda Garcia and Martha Lastre go door-to-door in Las Vegas.

“You have to understand the perspective of the people who open their doors to us, listen to them question this fundamental question,” Martha Lastre explains afterwards. “Then you can defend the idea that abortion is a personal choice that should belong to each person.” In the end, Gilberto said he would still vote Democrat.

The door-to-door canvassing, organized by chapters of the Culinary Workers Union (CWU), Nevada’s largest union, has been going on for weeks. Volunteers are legally removed from their permanent jobs and paid by the union for two or three months to do the field work. The tactic has been repeated since the 2020 and 2022 elections. The union also buys ads in local media, including in Spanish.

The CWU represents about 60,000 employees in Las Vegas and Reno, in the northern part of the state, the vast majority of whom are hotel and casino workers. The union is affiliated with Unite Here, a national federation with 300,000 members. In all, one in ten (11%) state employees are unionized, and the Democratic support of this committed minority remains steadfast.

“Nevada beat Trump with Hillary Clinton in 2016 and again with Biden in 2020, and we believe our members tipped the scales in these extremely close contests by knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors to start a political conversation,” said Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer of the union, which he led as president from 2012 to 2022. “We believe it will be even closer this time and that we will tip the scales again.” »

A Unionized Society of Nations

The interview takes place at the CWU headquarters, a large white bunker in the shadow of a telecommunications tower. Trees are lacking here as they are everywhere in this extremely concrete city, where water shortages now prohibit lawns. Stylized figurines painted on the walls announce the trades represented: a waiter and a waitress, a chef, a chambermaid, a valet, etc. At the door, a union employee receives the members in English and another in Spanish.

Union members come from 178 countries and speak about 40 languages. Half of union members (45%) were not born in the United States. Women (55%) and “Latinx” (54%), a gender-neutral term for Latino or Latina, make up the largest contingent. Hispanics make up 28% of the state’s population, and the first female senator from that community, Catherine Cortez Masto, who is running again, was born and raised in Las Vegas. In contrast, a New York Times poll released this weekend puts Kamala Harris at less than 60% of the voting intentions of Nevada’s Hispanic community, the lowest level in two decades for a Democratic candidate.

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11% That’s the share of Nevada employees who are unionized.

Martha Lastre, born in Cuba, arrived in Florida by boat as a refugee in the 1980s. She has worked as a banquet planner at the Luxor hotel and casino for a decade. She is now door-to-door for the first time in a month. Yolanda has lived in Las Vegas since 1999, where she arrived with her family as a teenager. This is her second street activism job.

Mr. Pappageorge was born in Las Vegas, where his parents were already working in hotels. The former bartender joined the union's permanent staff in 1991 after a nine-month strike.

An anthill that ignores itself

The city of vice, Elvis and services attracted nearly 41 million visitors in 2023, almost returning to the attendance threshold of the pre-pandemic years. For this mass of passers-by, the strip of hotels and casinos is all about bling-bling: neon lights, slot machines, shows, bars, restaurants and cheap decor.

For residents, for those who come and stay in Las Vegas, the giant adult theme park has been a workplace for decades. Las Vegas can actually be described as a center of impoverishment through gambling and a money-making machine for a few billionaires (which explains that), but also as a city of blue-collar workers who often don’t know it.

The average wage of a CWU union member will increase from $28 to $37 by 2028 (including benefits) under the collective agreement signed a year ago. In mid-September, the CWU signed a labor contract for employees of the Venetian Resort, making the strip100% unionized, including the hotel owned by Donald Trump and signed as such on the front. The Venetian was owned until his death in 2021 by Sheldon Adelson, a notorious anti-unionist and the presidential candidate’s biggest contributor in 2016 and 2020. His heirs sold the faux-Italian palace and other Las Vegas real estate for $6.5 billion.

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“We call it the Las Vegas dream, which is a city of companies, with hotels and casinos being like big factories in a sense,” Mr. Pappageorge says. Here, a good jobunion membership provides access to a good salary, a pension, health insurance for the whole family and the possibility of buying a home. The dream still holds, except that access to home ownership is much more difficult because of the price of houses. This is also one of the issues of the election campaign.”

The union organization notably administers the Culinary Health Fund, one of the largest health care groups in the country which provides medical services to more than 145,000 Nevadans in total, employees and their families. During a break from door-to-door canvassing, the two pro-Biden activists ask if it is true that in Canada access to health care is free for all.

The crumbling base

The base of the socioeconomic pyramid is struggling more and more, here as elsewhere. Unemployment is stagnating at 6.7% in Las Vegas, 2.5 points above the national average. Rents have increased by more than a third since 2019 in the metropolitan area with more than 2 million inhabitants, in part because teleworkers from California and other neighboring states have increased demand for housing. The construction of affordable housing has practically stopped. Large landlords have taken over swathes of the housing stock and are playing on sale or rental prices.

The cost of living is therefore becoming a central electoral issue. Galloping inflation is causing all bills to balloon.

Republican candidate Donald Trump, then the two Democratic senators from the state and candidate Kamala Harris all took advantage of trips to Las Vegas to promise not to tax tip income, which is charged everywhere, all the time for the slightest service at the counter, as in Quebec now. Donald Trump also added that he would not tax wage gains made through overtime.

The CWU notes that the Biden administration has already reduced the tax on tips by 60%. In Nevada, the minimum wage for employees is $12 an hour, with or without tips, while the “sub-wage,” the one with tips, drops to $2.13 an hour in 34 other states, according to federal law.

“We’ve been fighting these issues for 30 years, and we told Ms. Harris that reducing the tip tax is a good idea, but at the same time we need to address the minimum wage and eliminating the sub-minimum wage,” Pappageorge said. “This is a national issue, and the vice president has committed to raising the minimum wage.” »

This report was financed with the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund-Le Devoir.

A divided country and state

The battle for Nevada and its six electors in the laser-cut republic could swing presidential power one way or the other. The swing state, purple, half red, half blue, is also split in two: in the last elections, 15 of its 17 counties voted Republican while the other two, Clark and Washoe, with 90% of the population, including the big cities of Reno and Las Vegas, ultimately elected a governor, two senators and, in 2020, President Biden by a tiny margin. Democrats also control the state legislature with a majority of women representatives and the Culinary Workers Union, Nevada’s largest union, has three former members as candidates for this state chamber. On the other hand, two out of five adults are still not registered to vote. Hence the work of union members to encourage voters to vote.