KVIG Informative

Hattie Canty buried her husband in 1975, raised ten children on a hotel maid’s wages, and by 1990 led Nevada’s largest private-sector union. The strike she’s remembered for lasted six years and ended only after costing one hotel’s owner roughly $1 billion. The multiracial coalition she built inside the Culinary Union is the same one Nevada’s political campaigns still court today.

Canty grew up near Mobile, Alabama, and her family later moved west; she spent five years in California before arriving in Las Vegas in 1961, according to historian Christopher E. Johnson’s biographical account, which draws on Canty’s own 1998 interview with UNLV historian Claytee D. White, recorded for the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project.

Canty’s husband worked in construction until he died of lung cancer in 1975, leaving her to raise ten children. She began working as a maid and janitor in 1972, according to the AFL-CIO, and by the late 1970s and early 1980s she was cleaning rooms at the Maxim Hotel and Casino on the Strip, according to Johnson’s account.

Local 226’s membership elected Canty to its executive board in 1984, the same year a 75-day Las Vegas walkout centered on casino workers’ health insurance, according to the AFL-CIO. She was promoted to uniform attendant, a better-paying position, in 1987, and organizers with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union recruited her in 1989, Johnson’s account states. Local 226 elected her its president in 1990.

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Canty led a successful strike against Binion’s Horseshoe Hotel and Casino early in her presidency, according to Johnson’s account. Her signature fight began in 1991, when Culinary workers walked out of the New Frontier Hotel and Gambling Hall in a dispute the AFL-CIO calls the longest labor strike in American history.

The Frontier strike stretched six years before the hotel’s owner settled with the union, according to the AFL-CIO; Johnson’s account puts the cost to then-owner Margaret Elardi at roughly $1 billion by the time she sold the property. Canty’s own 1998 interview with White, recorded partway through her presidency, remains the primary record of how she led the local through that fight — housed today in UNLV Special Collections and Archives as part of its African American Experience in Las Vegas project.

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Canty also helped integrate the union’s own ranks, pushed to open better jobs to workers of color and established the Culinary Training Academy, the hospitality-skills school the union still runs, according to the AFL-CIO. By the time she retired from the presidency in 2002, Las Vegas hotel maids earned more than double what service workers made in other U.S. cities, according to Johnson’s account.

Canty died in 2012. The Culinary Training Academy she helped found is still training Las Vegas hospitality workers, and the union she rebuilt remains the single endorsement Nevada’s candidates compete hardest to win. Her own name rarely comes up when they do.