Despite the dismal national climate for labor, the Culinary Union undertook the strike against the Frontier Casino with some enthusiasm. In Las Vegas, unlike most service-oriented economies, the city’s gaming and hotel industry was highly unionized with its participation in UNITE HERE, a labor union with hundreds of thousands of members in the hotel, gaming, and food service industries across the United States and Canada. The bulk of that union participation was with the Culinary Union.8 Particularly in Las Vegas, the Culinary Union organized and bargained on behalf of workers in the hospitality industry despite Nevada’s Right-to-Work law, which had been on the books since 1953. The union membership extended to “guest room attendants, cocktail and food servers, porters, bellmen, cooks, bartenders, [and] laundry and kitchen workers.”9 These jobs typically paid minimum wage or less in most cities but, with the help of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, many of these service jobs provided a comfortable middle-class life. Widespread union membership in the casinos on the Las Vegas Strip and in downtown Las Vegas meant strikes could be effective. In addition, given the sheer numbers in the union, Culinary could wield real power in local and even state elections. Culinary’s position in Las Vegas, Clark County, and Nevada politics reflects both Nevada’s changing social structure and the gaming industry’s essential role in the local economy.

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Above all, the Culinary Union’s success can be attributed to its tenacious organizing efforts at the shop level before the strike. If, as McCracken said, unions are about contract enforcement, union organization is critical to giving unions the power to defend and enforce. Underlying these words, of course, is the power of “the strike” to achieve results, agreements, contracts. A union that wants to succeed needs to organize so that it can identify leaders on the shop floor and enhance their leadership skills. These leaders will reflect the membership and will be strong advocates for the union throughout their careers. It also takes skilled organization to choose realistic objectives and reject the unachievable. In 1989, Culinary was willing to cede ground on job description and combined job categories in order to get the Mirage contract that included the important card-check provision. The card-check milestone essentially offered a way around, or a defense against, Nevada’s Right-to-Work law should its comprehensive prohibitions of a union shop ever be cited in using the law against the union town that Las Vegas had become. At the same time, in the power structure of a community, an organized and motivated union membership can, and does, sway elections. The resulting political power gives unions the ability to defend the interests of their workers in any future struggles with management. In the redounding successes of the Culinary Union in Las Vegas, it took organizing to convince a demoralized, shrunken membership that the union, from the shop steward to the secretary-treasurer, would fight for them from the first day to the last, as demonstrated in the Frontier strike. Giving up was not an option in what can be seen as the right strike for the union in Las Vegas as the twentieth century closed.