The Culinary Union Local 226: How Las Vegas Organized the Strip

The people who change the sheets at Caesars Palace and the people who cook at the Bellagio and the people who mix drinks at the MGM Grand belong to one of the most effective union locals in the United States. The Culinary Workers Union Local two twenty-six represents approximately sixty thousand hotel and gaming industry workers on the Las Vegas Strip, making it one of the largest union locals in the country by membership and one of the most diverse by workforce composition.

The union began organizing Las Vegas hotel workers in the nineteen thirties, in the early years of the casino industry, and has maintained a continuous presence on the Strip through every wave of ownership change, from mob-connected operators to corporate conglomerates. The workforce it represents is predominantly women, predominantly people of color, and predominantly immigrant and first-generation American. The jobs it covers, housekeeping, food preparation, service, and front desk work, are the jobs that the Strip's official narrative has the least interest in celebrating and the most interest in filling at the lowest sustainable wage.

The union's contract negotiations with major Strip casino operators have produced some of the most significant labor agreements in Nevada history. Its organizing drives in the nineteen nineties and two thousands extended union coverage to properties that had operated union-free. Its political operation has been influential in Nevada elections across multiple election cycles.

The specific founding date of Local two twenty-six and the full history of its major strikes are documented in UNLV oral history collections and Nevada labor records that exceed what this track can fully cover. What the public record supports is the pattern: in an industry built on high turnover, low wages, and worker replaceability, one union has maintained collective bargaining for eight decades and counting.

The housekeepers in those towers are the people who made the Las Vegas Strip possible. The union is why some of them have health insurance.