KVIG Informative

A clause one Strip casino wrote into its first labor contract in 1989 didn’t just unionize that casino. Thirty-five years later, it became the method that finally brought every major casino on the Las Vegas Strip into the same union.

Steve Wynn’s Mirage opened on the Las Vegas Strip in November 1989 already represented by Culinary Union Local 226, after signing a first contract that included a card-check provision, according to a panel on Las Vegas hotel labor relations documented in the National Academy of Arbitrators’ 2004 proceedings. Richard McCracken, the union’s longtime outside counsel, told the panel the provision let the union grow with the industry by basing representation on card checks rather than only a formal election or a strike.

Under that approach, the Culinary Union could be recognized at a new casino once a majority of its workers signed authorization cards. The method spread quickly: the Excalibur became the next Strip casino to open under a card-check agreement with the union, in 1990, according to the Culinary Union’s own published history of its organizing.

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Not every Strip casino signed on, and the Culinary Union spent the following decades organizing newer resorts one at a time. The Venetian Resort Las Vegas opened in 1999 without a union contract and stayed non-union for 25 years.

The Culinary Union and the Venetian Resort Las Vegas reached a tentative four-year labor agreement at 6:42 a.m. on Aug. 20, 2024, covering more than 4,000 workers in the resort’s food, beverage, housekeeping, bar, lounge and bell departments, according to a Culinary Union statement. Workers later ratified the contract by a vote the union said was 99% in favor.

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The Culinary Union and the U.S. Department of Labor marked the contract’s completion with an event at the Venetian on Sept. 19, 2024, which the union described as celebrating the Las Vegas Strip’s first full unionization in its history. Then-Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Julie Su said the contract brought the Strip to a fully unionized workforce, according to the Culinary Union’s account of the event. Venetian Resort President and Chief Executive Officer Patrick Nichols credited the resort’s negotiating team for reaching the deal, and Culinary Union Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge said the contract extended union representation to all of the more than 4,000 Venetian workers it covered.

The card-check clause the Mirage signed in 1989 didn’t close the deal on its own — the Venetian held out for a quarter century after it opened. But it gave the union a route into every Strip casino that followed, and by September 2024, there was nowhere left on the Strip for that route to lead.