KVIG Informative

The Culinary Union was chartered in Las Vegas on Nov. 1, 1935, four months after Congress passed the federal law that first gave American workers a legal right to organize. Within two decades, that organizing had provoked Nevada lawmakers into passing a right-to-work law of their own, a statute still on the books today, even as the same union just finished a milestone that took the entirety of its 90-year history to reach: every casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip under a union contract at once.

The Culinary Union was chartered on Nov. 1, 1935, according to the union’s own published history. The charter came four months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act on July 5, 1935, the federal law that established American workers’ legal right to organize unions and bargain collectively, according to the National Labor Relations Board’s own account of the law’s passage.

On July 2, 1949, the Culinary Union led a strike in the Reno-Sparks area that ran seven days, closing 42 bars and drawing walkouts at 55 restaurants, according to the union’s own history. The union was seeking contracts covering all hotel service workers and higher wages, the union’s account says.

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A separate strike by Reno bartenders that slowed business in the city on July 4, 1948, is the episode Nevada lawmakers’ own research traces the state’s eventual right-to-work statute back to, according to a background paper published by the Nevada Legislature’s Legislative Counsel Bureau. That bartenders’ strike predated and was distinct from the Culinary Union’s own 1949 Reno-Sparks action, the background paper’s account shows.

Nevada voters approved the right-to-work initiative on Nov. 4, 1952, by a margin of 1,034 votes out of more than 76,000 cast — 38,823 in favor to 37,789 opposed — according to the Legislative Counsel Bureau’s background paper. The measure was codified as Chapter 1 of the 1953 Statutes of Nevada and took effect Jan. 1, 1953, the background paper says. It remains state law today at Nevada Revised Statutes 613.230 through 613.300, enacted under authority Congress gave the states in Section 14(b) of the federal Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

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Elmer “Al” Bramlet was elected the Culinary Union’s secretary-treasurer in 1954, according to the union’s own history. Under his leadership, the union’s membership grew from 1,000 workers to 22,000 by the time of his death in 1977, the union’s account says.

Ninety years after its 1935 charter, the Culinary Union reached a milestone in 2025 that had eluded it for the entirety of that history: every casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip came under a union contract at the same time, for the first time ever, according to the union’s own account of its 90th year. Nevada’s right-to-work law, the statute lawmakers built after the wave of organizing the Culinary Union helped set off in the state, still stands unchanged in structure from the day it took effect in 1953 — meaning full unionization of the Strip arrived in a state where no worker can be required to join, or pay, the union that just achieved it.