Jackpot!

Hotel and casino workers score a win after 6½ years of struggle.

Las Vegas

It wasn’t just the dead rabbit with two bullet holes in its head. There were a lot of things thrown at the picketers in front of Las Vegas’ Frontier Hotel and Casino. Over the 6½ years that union strikers walked the line, there were tomatoes, eggs, glass bottles and garbage, usually thrown from cars. The insults, though, were sometimes the hardest to take; day and night the constant barrage — "Get a job! Get a life!"

"Sometimes you felt like a street bum. Sometimes you didn’t," said Donnell Henderson, a striking Frontier worker and member of the Culinary Workers Union (CWU) Local 226. "When other unions walked with you, it picked you up. Then you were alone again."

So it was for the 550 strikers from five local unions who walked off their jobs at the Frontier Hotel and Casino on Sept. 21, 1991. As time passed, work at the Frontier became a distant memory, and life on the picket line, reality.

Many union members found new jobs. A few went bankrupt. Seventeen strikers died, and 107 babies were born to mothers who walked the picket line. Throughout it all, not one of the 550 strikers crossed the picket line.

"How did we hold together? How did we keep up morale?" mused Ellen Vernon, a Frontier guest room attendant and Local 226 member. "Sometimes we didn’t. But one way or another, we managed to lift each other up."

Rayford Turner, a Frontier cook and Local 226 member, believes the strikers had a strong sense of purpose: "You knew you were doing something very important for your kids, grandkids, the whole union and other unions."

THE BEGINNING. Frontier owner Margaret Elardi and her two sons were trouble since she bought the hotel in 1988. Saying the Frontier was too small to compete with other Las Vegas hotels, the Elardis began cutting wages and health benefits, and eliminated the pension plan and job security protections.

As the unions reached the end of their patience, CWU Sec.-Treas. Jim Arnold told the Elardis they were "starting a war that I think nobody wants." The Elardis shot back: "If the union wants to make war ... we will make them wish they never [did]."

On Sept. 19, 1991, five local unions took a strike vote. Members of the largest Frontier union, CWU Local 226, along with Bartenders Local 165, Teamsters Local 995, Operating Engineers Local 501, and Carpenters Local 1780, voted 464-to-7 in favor of the strike. Two days later, they were on the picket line.

Picket captains volunteered "to keep books, argue with cops, and keep strike tapes on the loudspeaker," said Lee Davis, a Local 226 picket captain. Picket shifts were scheduled round-the-clock, and almost 300 strikers signed up for one.

Arnold, who became one of the first to be arrested for trespassing on Frontier property, warned his members that the strike could be long. They adopted the rally cry, "One day longer." "Hold out just one day longer than the Elardis," Arnold said, "and victory will be yours."

Support from union brothers and sisters came as word spread. Non-striking CWU members in Las Vegas voted to double their dues to cover the $200 per week strike pay. Unions across the country, including AFSCME, made donations to cover strike expenses, which would amount to $26 million.

Rallies showed the Elardis the strikers had wide support. The largest rally was sponsored by AFSCME in 1992 when, as part of our International Convention, some 6,000 AFSCME members shut down traffic on the strip.

Those were the good days. Then there were the days "when you had to tell the kids that they couldn’t get new clothes for school," remembers Turner. And the day when the dozen 100-pound bags of manure were placed on Frontier property beside the picketers. Slit open to vent in the Las Vegas heat, they were left there stinking for more than a year.

Strikers’ creativity led to swift revenge this time, though. Thinking one airborne strike deserved another, the picketers started feeding pigeons. Soon the Frontier was a haven for the birds — and their abundant droppings.

CHARADES. For anyone who ever doubted it, rulings from the courts and National Labor Relations Board made it clear that the Elardis were on the wrong side of the struggle. Local politicians, the governor and Nevada’s U.S. senators called for the Elardis to negotiate an end to the strike. But negotiations with the family were mostly non-existent, according to John Wilhelm, chief negotiator for the strike and general secretary-treasurer of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International (HERE), representing both CWU Local 226 and the Bartenders union.

"It was a charade," Wilhelm said. "The Elardis weren’t interested in negotiating; they wanted to break the union."

Despite favorable legal rulings, Nevada labor laws lack "teeth," Wilhelm said. "The Elardis were cited over and over again," he noted, "but they appealed endlessly." And while hotel revenues were halved during the strike, the Elardis had no shareholders to protest.

BREAKTHROUGH. The man who would end the strike, Phillip Ruffin, approached Margaret Elardi with an offer to buy the Frontier in the fall of 1997. The Kansas City hotel owner and entrepreneur sewed up the deal within months.

That done, Ruffin sat down with union negotiators. "Within an hour, we negotiated the contract we wanted," Wilhelm noted.

Ruffin was an honored speaker at the Jan. 31 nighttime rally marking the official end of the strike. "I’m excited," he said. "Anyone with the [guts] to stay out here for six years, we want as our employees."

About 3,000 union members and supporters came to the rally for songs, chanting and celebration. Local and national leaders spoke to the crowd, including Nevada’s Gov. Robert Miller (D), U.S. senators Harry Reid (D) and Richard Bryan (D), the Rev. Jesse Jackson, AFL-CIO Sec.-Treas. Richard Trumka and AFSCME Pres. Gerald W. McEntee. McEntee thanked the strikers for their "red-hot solidarity ... that has given new life not only to AFSCME, but the entire Labor movement."

Exactly at midnight, the crowd escorted the local union members — many of them reporting to shifts — to the Frontier’s entrance. After Ruffin and Jackson cut the ceremonial ribbon, the crowd pressed through the hotel’s doors, filling the casino.

In all, 280 of the original 550 strikers returned to the Frontier with full senior-ity and pension credit for the strike’s duration.

A VICTORY TO REMEMBER. The Frontier strike and victory had great meaning for the Labor movement. "This strike [was] the most significant victory in American Labor since the early CIO days and Walter Reuther," McEntee commented.

In Las Vegas alone the stakes were high. "If we had failed in the Frontier strike," Wilhelm noted, "other casino owners would have tried it and all of Las Vegas labor would have gone down." In fact, several large Las Vegas unions have been without a contract since June 1997, as hotel owners awaited the outcome at the Frontier.

Despite the hardships of the strike, there is a sense of great accomplishment among the returning Frontier workers. Turner, who’s going back to cook at the Frontier, said, "You only get what you can take. This fight [at the Frontier] is over, but another will start somewhere else. You’ve got to have the heart to fight."

Local 226 strike leader Joe Daugherty — who became known as "Saint Joe" for his unrelenting optimism — also looks broadly at the impact of their local struggle: "In labor, they say, a union is only as strong as its next strike." To Daugherty and other Frontier strikers, sometimes walking a picket line is a job.

By Catherine Barnett Alexander