Five years ago, after a majority of workers at Red Rock Resort in Las Vegas signed cards to join the Culinary Workers Union, supervisors marched them into a series of mandatory meetings. The company promised employees free health care and new retirement benefits if they voted down the union, and vowed to drag out negotiations if the union won.
Red Rock, which is owned by billionaire brothers and major Trump donors Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, also launched an anti-union website, plastered with the faces of employees without their permission. Then, two days before the vote, workers were greeted with hundreds of free steaks in the employee dining room, each branded with the same message: VOTE NO!
On election day, only 46% of the workers voted for the union.
“They never actually wanted to listen to the workers,” said Veronica Gomez, 57, who has worked as a housekeeper at Red Rock since 2006 and helped lead the union drive. “They never wanted to give up any power.”
In June, though, the National Labor Relations Board, which oversees union elections, offered Gomez and her co-workers a win. After a protracted legal fight, the NLRB’s five-person board, which issues final agency decisions on judicial rulings that have been appealed, concurred with an administrative judge’s earlier decision that Red Rock management had engaged in “pervasive and egregious misconduct.” The board also employed, for the first time, a new protection against union-busting that it had issued in a decision last year called Cemex. Citing Cemex, the board forced Red Rock to immediately recognize and bargain with the union.
Breaking labor laws to keep a union out had, instead, ushered it in.
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Still, Gomez, the housekeeper at Red Rock, was grateful when she learned that the NLRB had a new way to try to force her employer to recognize the union. “I’ve been involved for more than 10 years in trying to get a union,” she said. “Ten years is a long time. But I also know that workers have always had to suffer to get what they want.”