Nevada’s unusual, powerful unions

THE busiest pharmacy in Nevada sits in an unremarkable strip mall in the shadows of Las Vegas’s glitzy casinos. Pharmacists accept prescriptions, dispense medicine and take no cash. Across town is the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, which trains people to be chefs, bakers, sommeliers and other food-service workers. There too, most students pay nothing for their classes. The roughly 57,000 members of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226 (CWU)—the state’s biggest union, representing employees at most of the casinos on the Vegas Strip and downtown—receive retraining and prescription drugs as benefits, along with comprehensive health care, pensions and supplemental insurance.

In addition to representing its members, the 82-year-old CWU has grown into a potent political force in Nevada. In the weeks leading up to last year’s election, 300 CWU workers took temporary leaves of absence—also a contractual benefit—to persuade and register potential voters. According to Bethany Khan, the CWU’s communications director, union members knocked on more than 350,000 doors and talked to over 75,000 voters.

For much of the 20th century, such campaigns were a staple of Democratic politics. Candidates stumped in union halls and relied on union donations. That helped keep culturally conservative but heavily unionised states such as Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia reliably Democratic long after Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan turned the South red.

But that connection has frayed. Donald Trump muses about turning the Republicans into “the party of the American worker”. Last year, his hostility to free trade and the general perception that Hillary Clinton and her party cared more about immigrants and upwardly mobile professionals than native workers gave Democrats their worst showing among union households since Walter Mondale’s 49-state loss to Reagan in 1984. In Ohio, for instance, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in union households by 23 percentage points. Four years later, Mrs Clinton lost to Mr Trump by 13 points while losing the state.

Nevada bucked this trend. Union efforts helped Hillary Clinton win Nevada on an otherwise disastrous day for Democrats, and also kept the state’s Senate seat Democratic when Catherine Cortez Masto succeeded the retiring Harry Reid. Although Nevada is a right-to-work state—meaning unions cannot compel workers in unionised sectors to pay dues—last year around 12% of its workers belonged to unions, down from 14% in 2015. Among similar states only Michigan, which did not go right-to-work until 2012, has a more unionised workforce. Union states in Appalachia and the Upper Midwest are white, old and shrinking, while Nevada and the CWU are young, multi-ethnic and growing. Maids and cleaners in Las Vegas average $15.26 an hour, nearly $4 more than they make elsewhere in America.

But anyone thinking that Nevada provides a blueprint for organised labour’s resurgence will probably be disappointed. Nevada depends heavily on a single sector: leisure and hospitality, which employs over a quarter of its workforce. That sector, in turn, is dominated by a finite number of huge properties in a single city, Las Vegas, which itself is a virtual island surrounded by inhospitable desert. Casinos in Atlantic City can bus workers in from Philadelphia, an hour away. Travel an hour outside Las Vegas and you will find yourself parched in an oven-baked moonscape. This isolation gives management and labour a strong incentive to work together. Union members have gone on strike, of course, but both sides seem to understand that a poisonous relationship risks wrecking the state’s main industry.

For now, Nevada’s casinos and convention centres in Las Vegas generate enough cash to leave everyone reasonably happy. Not all casinos are unionised, but even those that are not must pay prevailing union-negotiated wages if they want to retain skilled workers. The lack of direct foreign competition helps, too. A carmaker can shut down a plant and open another in Mexico or another state if an industrial dispute goes badly. The owner of a casino on the Las Vegas Strip cannot: what’s built in Vegas stays in Vegas.