AMERICA THE EXCEPTIONAL - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 272

The labor movement agrees. John Wilhelm is a former union organizer in Las Vegas
who is now president of the powerful Unite Here labor group, the parent union of workers
in the hotel, airport, restaurant, gaming, food-service and textile industries. The backbone
of the success of labor in Las Vegas is the Culinary Workers Union, which picketed for
years until it won accreditation and helped raise wages in Las Vegas.
“Every major hotel on the strip is unionized except the Venetian,” he said during an
interview at his union office in Washington, D.C. In the last two decades all unions have
lost momentum and membership. By contrast the service industries have shown growth.
Since tourism is the biggest service industry, Mr. Wilhelm sees opportunity, city by city.
The greater the union density, the better leverage for hotel workers, he said.
That leverage comes from union efforts, not from either political party or from the gov-
ernment, he said. Under the George W. Bush administration, labor laws lost most of their
power. And with hotel chains now managing rather than owning hotels, there “is a huge
problem of knowing who makes decisions and is responsible for wage and benefits.”
He pointed to Nevada, with a history of anti-union measures, and Massachusetts, which
is a pro-union state, as proof that no political party is guaranteed as an ally in the union
movement. In Boston in 2009 the Hyatt hotel chain laid off 100 housekeepers who were
paid an average of $15 an hour with health benefits and replaced them with contractor
employees. The contractor paid the new housekeepers the minimum hourly wage of $8
and no benefits. The Hyatt hotels of Boston issued a statement saying the layoffs were “re-
grettably part of an ongoing drive to address challenging economic conditions.” Governor
Deval L. Patrick said no State of Massachusetts employee could stay in a Hyatt hotel.
By contrast, said Wilhelm, the Las Vegas hotels have shown they understand that tour-
ism is a service industry that requires well-trained and well-paid employees. Las Vegas is
the template, he said, for paying service employees the wages and benefits that allow them
a decent living for a family and that, in turn, becomes the base for a successful tourism
industry. Tourism is the ultimate service industry. In most American cities, service employ-
ees like waitresses and housekeepers live on or below the poverty line. In Las Vegas the
employees have health care and paid vacations. The unions won these benefits with hard
bargaining and concessions, reducing the number of job categories and making it easier
for management to hold costs down while improving services.
“It's no exaggeration to say that the unions and management know that they are in this
together in Las Vegas,” said Wilhelm.
As tourism business becomes global, so do the unions. The United Nations' Interna-
tional Labour Organization in Geneva coordinates efforts to insure that workers' rights are
respected in the vast industry. Wolfgang Weinz of the ILO said that, at a minimum, one
out of ten workers in the world is employed by the tourism industry, a squishy figure that
may be a serious underestimate.