This is an odd alternative version of Vegas history: -The mob and the outfit guys would not of course be -opposed to unionism.
Except mob-controlled companies have opposed unionization in all sorts of other places where their bankers were not the Teamsters. Remember, in Vegas the mob WAS management until the last 70s/80s replaced them with corporate money.
-from their POV unions offer a perfect -opportunity to rob the workers without too much threat -of force -- the workers voluntarily pay their dues -into the hood-run/controlled/influenced unions, -providing a fund to be robbed in peace and quiet.
Except the workers in Vegas did quite well for themselves, far better than non-union hotel workers in other right-to-work states.
And the union could be quite militant at times. I'll tell you the story about the militant feminist cocktail waitresses who organized a radically progressive shift system in the 1970s -- the oldest waitresses got the high-roller tables and the young pretty things had to start on the slot machines. I love the fact that in Vegas, a high-roller could buy almost anything in Vegas, except a young thing to replace his drinks at the card table. And that was thanks to the union.
-And -conrtrol of the unions left the hoods with the ability -to extort the bosses by threatening (and then calling -off) labor trouble, while selling out the workers -though giving them something.
Again, evidence? I talked to literally hundreds of Vegas workers when I was there and, except for the period right after the union local leader was killed in the late 1970s, I never heards a SINGLE complaint about the union leadership back then selling them out. And this was years later when the mob was gone from the union and almost all of the hotels.
-Maybe the outfit guys -who ran Vegas were relatively benign, though it is -hard to think of applying that word to, say, Tony -Spilotro. But what about the mob guys who ran Jackie -Presser and Frankie Fitzsimmons? I really don't think -taht hoodlum influence in the unions counts as -"honest/clean graft."
The Presser/Fitzsimmons period is a perfect example of dishonest graft. The tougher analysis is the Jimmy Hoffa Sr. period when long-distance truckers did very well and wages and benefits soared. Would you seriously argue that the workers would have done better with no union rather than Hoffa's leadership, however tainted?
Nathan Newman