KVIG Informative

A single hiring decision made seven decades ago still shapes who works Las Vegas’s casino floors today. In 1954, the union representing the Strip’s hospitality workers began deliberately recruiting outside Nevada to grow its ranks — a strategy that helped build the labor bloc that, by 2024, could claim every major resort on the Strip as union territory.

The Culinary Workers Union Local 226 was founded in 1938, soon after passage of the federal National Labor Relations Act, according to a UNLV Special Collections finding aid describing the union’s archival records. The union grew slowly at first, representing roughly 1,000 hospitality workers in its early years, the finding aid states.

Nevada’s Legislature passed a right-to-work law in 1953, according to the union’s own published history, a measure that curbed the kind of mandatory-membership contracts unions elsewhere relied on to grow.

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A recruiting trip that changed the union’s math

Members elected Elmer “Al” Bramlet as secretary-treasurer in 1954, and under his leadership the union began actively recruiting African American workers from Southern states to fill Las Vegas hospitality jobs, according to a UNLV Special Collections finding aid on the Johnny LaVoie Papers, a collection documenting the union’s history. The finding aid describes the recruitment as a deliberate strategy that diversified both the union’s membership and Nevada’s hospitality workforce.

Membership expanded from roughly 1,000 workers to 16,000 by the time of Bramlet’s death in 1977, according to the same finding aid.

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The union has kept growing since. The Culinary Union today represents 60,000 members across Las Vegas and Reno, and in 2024 the Las Vegas Strip reached 100 percent unionized status for the first time, with every casino resort on the Strip operating under a union contract, according to the union’s own published history.

Bramlet’s 1954 decision to recruit outside Nevada wasn’t just a membership drive. It built the bloc that, seven decades later, can say it represents workers at every major resort on the Las Vegas Strip — one hiring hall, one contract, one organizing trip to the Deep South at a time.