KVIG Informative

Local 720 today represents thousands of the technicians who build and run Las Vegas Strip production. Few of its current members could say that for nearly three years in the 2000s, the union had no leadership of its own choosing — run instead by trustees answering first to its international parent and then to a federal judge.

The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees chartered its Las Vegas stagehands as Local 720 in 1939, according to the international union’s own published history. The local started with nine members, according to the Las Vegas local’s own account of its founding, representing the technicians who built sets and ran lighting for the city’s earliest stage productions.

By 2002, Local 720 had grown to roughly 1,300 members working Strip showrooms, concerts and conventions. On April 15, 2002, IATSE’s general executive board revoked the local’s charter, citing a breakdown in the union’s democratic process and noncompliance with the IATSE constitution, following a hearing on member complaints held in Las Vegas on March 20, 2002.

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The international union placed Local 720’s operations under an appointed trustee, Robert Trombetta, the following month. A group of 12 former Local 720 executive council members, led by Scot Roper, sued in federal court to challenge the trusteeship and sought a preliminary injunction to restore their authority.

U.S. District Judge Howard McKibben denied that injunction in late August 2003, ruling that the former officers had not shown the trusteeship would cause irreparable harm, and set a further hearing on the trusteeship’s underlying legality for Sept. 23, 2003, according to the federal court record in the case.

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The trusteeship ran for more than two and a half years. Local members elected new officers starting Dec. 15, 2004, in balloting overseen by the U.S. Department of Labor, and swore in Local 720 president Hal Ritzer and other officers on Dec. 17, 2004, with four more officers seated Jan. 7, 2005, following a runoff. IATSE President Thomas Short notified local leaders by letter on Dec. 24, 2004, that the trusteeship had ended, though a lawsuit from the former pre-2002 leadership alleging fraud in the original revocation remained pending in federal court.

Local 720 kept organizing in the years that followed. Technicians at the Coast Casinos’ Orleans, Gold Coast and Suncoast properties voted 10-6 to join the local in a National Labor Relations Board election on June 28, 2007, according to the international union’s own report on the vote.

Today the local represents more than 4,000 technicians across nearly 100 job classifications, spanning stagehand work, projection and audiovisual, film and television, trade shows and wardrobe, according to Local 720’s own current membership figures. The union that spent nearly three years in 2002 unable to elect its own leadership now outnumbers its pre-revocation membership by more than three to one.