KVIG Informative

In 1984, more than 17,000 Culinary Union members walked off the job at 32 Las Vegas Strip resorts and stayed out 67 days, and six casinos still refused to sign a union contract when it ended. More than four decades later, the Culinary Union says every casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip is unionized — proof that the fight the 1984 strikers didn’t finish got won anyway, one holdout at a time.

Contracts between Strip resorts represented by the Nevada Resort Association and the Culinary Union and Bartenders Union expired at the same time in 1984, and many hotels refused to sign new agreements, according to the Culinary Union’s own published history. More than 17,000 Culinary Union members from 32 Strip resorts walked out, joined by the Bartenders union, the stagehands union IATSE and the Musicians union.

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Culinary Union members won a new contract after 53 days on strike, according to the union’s own history. They stayed off the job another two weeks in solidarity with Musicians and IATSE members who hadn’t yet settled, bringing the total to 67 days. Las Vegas police arrested roughly 900 strikers during the walkout, the union’s history states.

Six casinos did not sign union contracts when the strike ended: the Four Queens, Sam’s Town, the California, the Holiday International, the Holiday Inn South and the Marina Hotel and Casino, according to the Culinary Union’s own history. The Holiday International later reopened under new ownership as the union Main Street Station. The Marina was absorbed into an MGM Grand expansion in 1989 as a union property. The Four Queens held out the longest. It did not return to union status until 2003, nearly two decades after the strike that tried to organize it.

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The UNLV Special Collections finding aid for its Las Vegas, Nevada Strip Hotel Labor Relations Collection, which covers Strip labor records from 1963 to 2008, describes the same walkout: Strip contracts expiring at the same time, both the Culinary and Bartenders unions on strike, more than 900 arrests and six resorts that didn’t sign. The finding aid, citing historian James P. Kraft’s 2009 book on Nevada labor conflict, frames the strike as part of a wider run of disputes as Las Vegas shifted from family-run casinos toward corporate gaming ownership through the 1970s and 1980s.

The Culinary Union now says every casino resort on the Las Vegas Strip carries a union contract. That claim rests on holdouts like the Four Queens eventually signing, not on the 1984 strike settling the question outright. Nineteen years is a long wait for one hotel to come around — long enough that most of the people who walked picket lines in 1984 had moved on to other jobs, retirement or nothing at all before it happened.