It's the Culinary, stupid

ONE NEEDN'T BE ENROLLED in an insider political clique (it's just like high school, but with campaign contributors!) to have a serviceable grasp of local politics.

Whoever your county commissioner, you can bet that person has close friends in the growth/development and gambling/hotel industries, meets frequently with senior citizens and enjoys petty backbiting. And while people may not be able to name their state legislator, they know with a fair degree of certainty that whoever it is, that elected official can be relied upon to muddle through with no intention of championing anything significantly progressive anytime soon.

That's not to say that people shouldn't care about state and local policy. It's just to acknowledge that it's so very rare for a state or local politician to propose anything approximating an agenda of any measurable consequence and so, life being short....

Similarly, it's safe to say that most people driving the overcrowded streets of Las Vegas don't and probably shouldn't care much if the Culinary Union Local 226 is washed up politically, as all the damned pundits say.

The Culinary was pummeled and humiliated by the once-impressive Hillary Clinton machine at January's Nevada caucuses when Clinton got more support at on-the-job Strip caucus sites than the union's endorsed candidate, that nice young Obama gentleman. Ergo, the union has been exposed as a paper tiger whose much-vaunted political power was but a ruse, a myth, a hoax. Perhaps you saw the headlines.

So does it mean anything? Well, before presidential wannabes found Nevada on a map last year, the Culinary union's political plays consisted mostly of propping up or taking out one of those aforementioned county commissioners or state legislators to whom hardly anyone pays any attention except a) consultants, b) campaign contributors and c) politicians who seem to serve as middlemen for financial transactions between a) and b). So if most of the community reacts to reports about the Culinary's waning political muscle with a hearty ho-hum, fair enough.

The union's economic muscle is another matter.

The average wage in Southern Nevada's leisure and hospitality industry is $13.84 per hour, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. Granted, nobody's going to load the trophy wife and the golf clubs into the Hummer and drive to the summer lodge at Tahoe on those dollars.

But that wage is 54 percent higher than the national mean of $8.98. Thanks to the Culinary.

And the wage is going up. The union beautifully parlayed courtship by presidential candidates last year into pressure on the world's largest gambling/hotel corporations to agree to renewed five-year contracts that, according to the union, will add $3.47 to Strip resort workers hourly wages and benefits. It was a surprisingly good use of politicians for a union that many now say is politically inept, no?

And speaking of benefits ... throughout the rest of the nation, industries are shifting more of the rising cost of health care to workers -- with the exception of the service sector, which typically doesn't offer any health care benefits at all.

In Las Vegas, by contrast, unionized hotel workers continue to have full family health coverage and pay no premiums under one of (if not the) best health care benefits packages enjoyed by any private-sector workers in the nation.

But wait, you say (or maybe you don't say, but let's pretend you do), lots of folks who work at nonunion properties like the Venetian or Station Casinos are paid as well as folks who work in unionized Strip properties, and they have good benefits too.

Exactly.

If the Venetian or the Station properties want to compete in the area labor market, they've got to offer wages and benefits that are comparable to those offered in properties where workers have fought for and won the right to bargain collectively. In other words, the Culinary places upward pressure on wages, not just in hotels where workers are unionized, but throughout the entire Southern Nevada economy.

That the Culinary even found itself in the center of contentious presidential politics was a tad counterintuitive from the get-go. The Culinary's parent union, UNITE HERE, was one of the organizations that joined the Service Employees International Union in splitting from the national AFL-CIO a couple years back to form the Change to Win coalition. The argument at the time was that the AFL-CIO and American labor generally had become too preoccupied with raising money for politicians like, oh, the profoundly ineffective Dick Gephardt, and not occupied enough with supporting campaigns to grow union membership and win better wages and benefits for employees.

Perhaps no union in the nation -- and almost certainly none representing employees in the private sector -- has boasted more success at organizing new workers and securing favorable wage and benefits packages than the Culinary in Las Vegas over the last several years. And they did it during a time that union membership continued to drop nationally.

Representing the interests of workers and throwing political muscle around are not mutually exclusive, and one often goes with the other. But the former, not the latter, is what the Culinary does best, and arguably they do it as well as any union in America today.

Hannity-watching, Limbaugh-listening, Review-Journal editorial-reading Southern Nevadans who like to bitch and moan about the pernicious impact of evil unions would never acknowledge how important the Culinary is to their very own prosperity. Right-wing ideology, still fashionable in some quarters, wouldn't allow it. Their reason clouded by wingnuttery, they simply don't get it.

But the world's largest gambling/hotel companies don't pay a living wage and provide decent benefits out of the goodness of their hearts (not least because companies aren't human units and so don't have hearts). If not for the union, wages of all working people in this town would be even lower, and benefits even more scarce, than they already are. A poorer workforce means a less vital consumer core, which in turn means less money for bidnesses, less opportunity for entrepreneurs, even more social ills than the town already suffers and lower quality of life in general. By every imaginable measurement, without the union, Las Vegas simply wouldn't be the same; it would be much, much worse.

It's fun for the inside-baseball set -- and even the occasional pundit permanently damned to be an outsider -- to wonder about the Culinary's political punch.

But it's in the best interest of everyone, including those who don't care and those who do but don't get it, that the Culinary continues to throw considerable weight around in the local economy.

Hugh Jackson is a longtime local journalist, former senior editor of CityLife and the proprietor of the Las Vegas Gleaner (www.lasvegasgleaner.com), where he blogs.