KVIG Informative

A Chicago merger in the summer of 2004 joined garment workers with hotel and restaurant workers under one international union. Two decades later, the single largest local in that merged union isn’t in New York or Chicago. It’s the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, on Spring Mountain Road in Las Vegas.

UNITE, described in the merged union’s own account as the garment, textile and laundry workers union, merged with the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees on July 8, 2004, forming UNITE HERE, according to a press release UNITE HERE issued on the merger’s one-year anniversary in July 2005. The release described the newly combined organization as a union of nearly half a million workers.

The merger’s terms were formalized in a convention constitution dated 2004, held today in the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University’s ILR School, according to the center’s own catalog record for the document. The record lists the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union as the document’s author and places it within a 14-cubic-foot collection of the union’s records.

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Las Vegas’s Culinary Workers Union Local 226 predates that merger by nearly 70 years. The local was chartered on Nov. 1, 1935, according to its own published history, decades before either of the unions that combined to create UNITE HERE existed in their 2004 form. Before the merger, Local 226 belonged to the standalone Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees union, one half of the organization that would become UNITE HERE.

In its one-year anniversary release, UNITE HERE’s leadership said the merger had already produced results for workers, citing strikes and lockouts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Atlantic City, along with new laundry and hotel contracts and neutrality agreements reached in the merger’s first 12 months. The release credited the merger with accelerating organizing gains its leaders said neither predecessor union could have achieved alone.

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Local 226 is UNITE HERE’s largest affiliate, according to the local’s own published history, which places that distinction in 2008. The local’s website lists its current membership at more than 60,000 workers, led by President Diana Valles and Secretary-Treasurer Ted Pappageorge, according to its officers page.

The 2004 merger was built to pool bargaining power between two industries that had little in common beyond a shrinking union membership and a shared fear of going it alone. Twenty-two years later, it isn’t the needle trades keeping that bet alive. It’s a hospitality local on the Las Vegas Strip, now the biggest single affiliate in a union that was supposed to need all of its parts equally.