KVIG Informative

A trust fund jointly run by a union and the employers it bargains against has paid for Las Vegas hospitality workers’ health care since the 1960s, growing into one of Nevada’s largest health care purchasers along the way. Six decades later, some of the same workers the fund was built to serve are picketing the union that helps run it, testing how well that joint structure still answers to them.

Culinary Workers Union Local 226 chartered in Las Vegas on Nov. 1, 1935, according to the union’s own published history. By the 1960s, the union had organized its members’ health and welfare benefits into a formal trust, the Culinary Health Fund, the same history states.

That structure exists because of federal labor law. The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947, known as the Taft-Hartley Act, allows an employer to pay into a trust fund for its unionized employees’ benefit only if employer and employee representatives are equally represented in administering that fund, according to the statute’s text at 29 U.S.C. § 186(c)(5). The Culinary Health Fund operates today as that kind of jointly trusteed, multi-employer fund, sponsored by the union and Las Vegas-area employers together, according to the fund’s own published description.

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The fund expanded steadily in the decades that followed. The Culinary and Bartenders Unions Pension Plan launched in 1971 and has since paid out more than $1.6 billion in pension benefits to roughly 25,000 retirees a year, according to the union’s published history.

In 1997, the Culinary Health Fund became the first health plan in Nevada to recognize and provide benefits to same-sex domestic partners, 17 years before Nevada recognized same-sex marriage, according to the same history.

The fund opened the Culinary Pharmacy in 2001, described by the union as the first free-standing pharmacy of its kind in the country, dispensing roughly 500,000 prescriptions a year and providing generic drugs at no cost to eligible members, according to the union’s history.

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The fund now covers more than 120,000 participants, including workers and their dependents, through Culinary Health Centers that provide primary, dental, vision and mental health care with no monthly premiums or deductibles, according to the fund’s own published figures. Local 226 and its sister Bartenders Union Local 165 together represent roughly 60,000 Las Vegas and Reno hospitality workers, according to the unions’ own account.

That joint structure is now facing pressure from inside the union’s own ranks. Local 226’s 2023 contract sets a wage increase of $1.55 an hour effective Oct. 1, 2026, with $1.06 of that increase directed into the Culinary Health Fund rather than paid out as wages. Organizers with a group calling itself the Fair Union Reform Movement 226, including longtime member Donna Kelly and Caesars Palace housekeeper Elizabeth Renteria, have picketed Local 226’s headquarters weekly since late August 2026 over that allocation and over fund rules they say now require members to use one of its four Culinary Health Centers or pay higher out-of-network costs.

Diana Valles serves as Local 226’s president and Ted Pappageorge as its secretary-treasurer, according to the union’s own website. Pappageorge has responded to the pickets by describing the protesting members as a small fraction of the union’s 60,000-member base.

The Taft-Hartley structure that built the Culinary Health Fund guaranteed hospitality workers a formal, equal seat at the table where decisions about their health benefits get made. Six decades later, the members picketing Local 226’s own headquarters over the October allocation and clinic access are pressing the same question that structure was built to answer: whether that seat still belongs to them.