Whether you clean hotel rooms or bake pastries or wash dishes, if you do it in Las Vegas, you do it earning a living wage with full health care and a pension plan.

You can feel that the American Dream is alive and well walking through the casinos.

It’s in the optimism of the staff, in their swagger. 

“Anywhere else, if you’re working in a restaurant or if you’re cleaning toilets or you’re cleaning rooms, these are poor-people jobs,” Ted Pappageorge, secretary-treasurer for the Culinary Union, told me. “And the only difference is if there’s a union. And if you have a big union presence, then the nonunion has to compete, too. They gotta pay, otherwise, they can’t get people.” 

How do they do it? 

Certainly, the union has been instrumental — even as Nevada remains a right-to-work state.

The union has successfully made the case to its workers that, as Pappageorge put it, “the idea that you should be alone and somehow try to take on this economy and this world and all those forces out there that are really opposing what working people need, [this] is a way to lose.”