--- Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "andie nachgeborenen"
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com>
> -I don't know the story behind the suprising
> strength
> -of the unions in Vegas, but I'd like to see
> evidence
> -that the mob's looting of the Central States
> Pension
> -fund to build the casinos via Hoffa, Dorfman, and
> -others contributed to that. As I understand it the
> -timing is off: the mob build Vegas with stolen
> union
> -pension money in the late 50s and 60s, then (if
> -Pilaggi is right) got booted from Vegas in the 80s
> and
> -replaced ws key players in gaming by giant
> =corporations - MGM, Disney, and the like. It was in
> -this period, it's my understanding, that
> unionization
> -in Vegas took off. That was also the period in
> which
> -the Central States Pension Fund was freed from mob
> -control.
>
> As a former organizer in Las Vegas and someone who's
> read a bunch of
> histories of the city and the unions, you just need
> to read the history
> better. The union was established in the 1950s and
> the Teamster money was
> a big reason none of the hotels objects -- as long
> as they didn't try to
> unionize the guys counting the money in the cage
> where the mob was skimming
> the cash. By the 1970s, the whole town was
> unionized wall-to-wall; older
> workers told me that even the Denny's was once
> unionized. Then the
> corporate owners like Howard Hughes came in-- they
> were the ones who began
> trying to bust the union. There were major strikes
> in the 1970s and then,
> with even greater corporate ownership in the 1980s,
> a full-scale assault on
> the union in 1984. A number of the hotels were
> deunionized and new hotels
> began opening non-union. Workers all spoke fondly
> of the mob owners in
> comparison to the new corporate owners.
>
> Enter the 1989 negotiations (where I came in as a
> young organizer)-- that
> was the do-or-die fight where outside organizers
> were brought in and the new
> organizing model developed to deal with the union.
> This was the rebirth of
> the union but not it's first time getting a
> foothold. In fact, it was just
> restoring the strength it once had back in the olden
> days.
>
> -- Nathan Newman
>
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