Looking towards the upcoming Nevada caucus, The American Prospect is re-running a great article by Harold Meyerson from 2004 showing how joining together in a union (Culinary Workers Local 226, an affiliate of UNITE HERE) has improved the lives of tens of thousands of service-sector workers in Las Vegas:
Ever since it was a gleam in Bugsy Siegel's eye, Las Vegas has been America's No. 1 Pottersville, rife with gambling, pawnshops and prostitution. Now, courtesy of Local 226, it's also America's No. 1 Bedford Falls -- the only city in the land where service-sector workers in supposedly dead-end jobs can afford to buy homes, retire securely and put their kids through college. "We've forced the social contract [into existence] here," says [secretary-treasurer of Local 226] D. Taylor....
The consequences of that transformation are plainly visible in Vegas. UNLV economist C. Jeffery Waddoups has compared the hotel industries in Nevada's two major gambling centers, concluding that the median wage for hotel work in Vegas is 40.2 percent higher than in nonunion Reno. The union in Vegas has also narrowed the disparity between white and Hispanic living standards. (Local 226 is 43 percent Hispanic, 41 percent white.) Fully 81 percent of non-Hispanic and 78 percent of Hispanic hotel and gaming employees in Vegas have job-based health insurance, a level of parity not found in other sectors of the local economy.
UPDATE: Meyerson's op-ed in today's Washington Post is pretty good, too.
