TALES OF VEGAS PAST Frontier picket line, circa 1996.

Thursday, July 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Tales of Vegas Past: A really long shift at the Frontier

By Gregory Crosby

In the long, surging tug of war between labor and management in Las Vegas, a slow, painful progression that mirrored in many ways the larger story of unions in America, no labor walkout was slower to resolve than the Culinary Union's strike at the Frontier hotel-casino in the '90s. For an amazing 2,325 days, 550 workers stuck to their guns and outlasted perhaps the last of the maverick, non-union gaming families, the Elardis. It was Frontier owner Margaret Elardi's misfortune not to understand the gains in power and respect the Culinary Union had made since the 1984 citywide strike that had seen the union take on the anti-unionism of the emerging corporate-owned resort properties and come out the other side victorious.

But then the Elardis, which included the gaming matriarch Margaret and her sons, Tom and John, were more tone deaf to the huge changes taking place in the Vegas power structure than most. When Margaret Elardi was a part-owner of the Pioneer Club in the '70s, union-busting was still a recognized business sport, and she duly busted both the Culinary and Bartenders unions there. In 1988, using the profits from her non-union Pioneer Hotel in Laughlin, she bought the Frontier and the Silver Slipper from Summa Corp., two down-at-the-heels vestiges of Howard Hughes' brief gaming empire (the Frontier itself was also the second-oldest hotel property on the Strip).

It was the Elardis' bid for a piece of the action on the Strip, and they began squandering it immediately. For no apparent reason, they tore down the popular and politically famous Silver Slipper (from which Hughes had made huge campaign contributions to local and state races in the early '70s), replacing it with a perpetually empty parking lot that now serves as the roof of the Desert Inn superarterial. Next, they began stripping the Frontier of whatever frills it still had in a bid to go after low-income gamblers, ditching the showroom (and sending Siegfried and Roy on to their spectacular success at The Mirage), tossing out other entertainment and amenities left and right, until the property resembled nothing more than a warehouse filled with slot machines. While Steve Wynn and other newly corporate casinos were making the changes and innovations that led to the Strip's fantastic growth in the '90s, the Elardis were moving backward.

But most telling was the fact that, unrecognized by the Elardis, their fervent and implacable non-unionism was now out of place on the Strip as well. The victories in the late '80s of the Culinary Union over anti-labor bias at Binion's Horseshoe and the Boyd properties, both of which had long histories of family ownership (and which eventually accepted the inevitable and became corporations), showed the shift from union-busting and labor antagonism as a way of life to the inescapable fact that working in concert with unions was ultimately good for business. Corporations, in their impersonal eye toward the bottom line and hunger for ever-spiraling growth, understood this, and the transformation of gaming businesses from proprietorships to publicly traded companies facilitated a more positive attitude to collective bargaining.

When the Elardis slashed wages, eliminated pension contributions, implemented new work rules without union consultation, changed the grievance procedure and engaged in a host of other unfair practices, those 550 workers, from four different unions, struck the hotel on Sept. 21, 1991. Little did they know they would spend the next 6 1/2 years in the twilight of the longest labor walkout in U.S. history. Not one crossed the picket line, and to the Elardis' dismay, no one else did either. Their tenacity was only part of their success, however. The changed climate of Vegas did the rest, as the forces of courts, police, political officials and newspapers that had in the past been hostile to strikes now brought pressure on the just-as-tenacious Elardis to settle.

Most galling for the embattled Elardis was perhaps the reaction of fellow casino owners, who for the most part now wanted nothing to do with the bad press that union-busting entailed. Of particular note was Circus Circus Enterprises chairman William Bennett, who was quoted as saying, "Las Vegas has enough of an image problem without the Frontier making it worse. We just had a record quarter, and we're unionized." Bennett fed workers on the picket lines three times a day for free, an astonishing act of generosity that the strikers never forgot.

In the end, the isolation of the Elardis, who were handed defeat after defeat by the courts, and who had no friends in gaming or political circles, proved their undoing. At last they sold the Frontier to Kansas businessman Phil Ruffin, who promptly signed contracts with the unions, bringing the strike to an end. While new players on the Vegas landscape would (and likely will) continue to challenge the Culinary Union, the Wild West days of casino proprietors calling all the shots when it came to labor relations were over.