KVIG Informative

Six years, four months and 10 days is how long it took the Culinary Union to outlast a single Strip hotel owner’s refusal to bargain. Every Culinary contract signed on the Strip since has been negotiated in the shadow of that fact.

On Sept. 21, 1991, hospitality workers walked off the job at the New Frontier Hotel and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip, according to Culinary Workers Union Local 226’s own account of the strike. More than 550 members of the Culinary Union and its sister unions maintained a 24-hour picket line outside the property from that day forward, the same account states.

The New Frontier’s owners, Margaret Elardi and her sons Tom and John Elardi, removed significant benefits from the workers’ contract, triggering the walkout, according to a finding aid for the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 photograph collection held by UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives. Tom Elardi served as the hotel’s general manager at the time, the same finding aid states.

Hattie Canty had been elected president of Culinary Workers Union Local 226 the year before the strike began, according to UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives, which holds her recorded oral history. Canty walked picket lines on her days off throughout her presidency and was taken into custody at least six times during union strikes, the same collection states.

Donate

Donate

The strike continued for six years, four months and 10 days, according to Culinary Workers Union Local 226’s own account. Seventeen strikers died and 107 children were born to strikers’ families during that span, the same account states. Not one of the more than 550 picketers crossed the line, according to the same source.

The strike ended Feb. 1, 1998, when Phil Ruffin purchased the New Frontier and signed a contract with the union, according to Culinary Workers Union Local 226’s own account. Every striker who wanted to return to work was able to do so, with back pay and restored benefits negotiated into the settlement, according to the same source and a finding aid held by UNLV Libraries Special Collections and Archives.

Donate

Donate

Culinary Workers Union Local 226 and its parent union, UNITE HERE, marked the 30th anniversary of the strike’s start on Feb. 5, 2022, with UNITE HERE President D. Taylor appearing at the commemoration, according to the union’s own account of the event.

No Strip operator has tried to outlast the Culinary Union in a strike of that length since. The New Frontier itself is gone from the Strip’s skyline, but the union that spent six years camped outside its doors still negotiates every contract that follows it as though the clock is running against the house, not against its members.