KVIG Informative

The last time Culinary Union Local 226 pushed a contract fight all the way to a deadline, no one walked out. The union’s 60,000 members ratified a five-year contract in 2024 worth roughly $3 billion in raises without a single strike day — leverage built on decades of demonstrating it can shut down the Las Vegas Strip when it has to, starting with the first time it actually did, in March 1970.

The Culinary and Bartenders unions struck 16 casinos on the Las Vegas Strip for four days, from March 12 to March 15, 1970, according to Culinary Union Local 226’s own published history. It was the first time in the city’s history that casinos went dark simultaneously, the union’s history states, with airlines reporting near-empty flights into Las Vegas, taxis sitting idle and hotel rooms going unbooked across the city while the walkout lasted.

The Nevada Resort Association, the casino industry’s trade group, estimated the Strip was losing about $600,000 a day in profits during the shutdown, according to the union’s account. Then-Gov. Paul Laxalt stepped in to broker emergency negotiations between the unions and the resorts, the union’s history states, and the strike ended after four days.

The 1970 walkout wasn’t the union’s first labor action, nor its last. Culinary Union Local 226 was chartered Nov. 1, 1935, according to its own history, and members had already struck Downtown Las Vegas casinos for six days in 1967, two years before the Strip-wide shutdown. The union struck again for nine days in 1973 and for 16 days in 1976, when Culinary joined the Musicians and Stagehands unions in a walkout against 15 hotels, according to a UNLV Special Collections finding aid documenting Las Vegas Strip hotel labor relations.

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The pattern repeated on a larger scale in 1984, when a 67-day citywide strike involved more than 17,000 workers, and again from 1991 to 1998, when Culinary and Bartenders members picketed the Frontier for six years, four months and 10 days — the longest strike in the union’s history — before that hotel’s owners sold the property, according to the union’s own account.

By 2023, the threat of another Strip-wide shutdown carried more weight than any single walkout could. Culinary Union members authorized a strike that September with a 95 percent vote, setting a Nov. 10, 2023, deadline covering tens of thousands of workers at MGM Resorts, Caesars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts properties, according to the union’s own account of the vote.

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No strike happened. Wynn Resorts, Caesars Entertainment and MGM Resorts each reached agreements with the union before the deadline, and members ratified a new five-year contract in 2024 covering more than 50,000 hospitality workers, with a 10 percent wage increase in the first year and 32 percent in total raises over the life of the contract — worth roughly $3 billion altogether, according to the union’s own account of the settlement.

Fifty-four years separate the four days the Strip’s casinos first went dark from the contract Culinary Union workers won without walking out at all. The leverage didn’t come from any single strike — it came from every resort operator on the Strip knowing the union has already proven, more than once, that it will.