Last Friday, D. Taylor stepped down as president of UNITE HERE—the union of hotel and casino employees. His nearly dozen years at the helm of one of America’s most member-involved unions saw it become an improbable political powerhouse in a host of swing states and key elections.
If anything, Taylor’s tenure coincided with industry practices that should have made already difficult union-building all the harder. These days, the people working behind the hotels’ registration desks and in kitchen and waitstaffs may well be employed not by the hotel itself but by contractors—a route hotel owners have taken precisely to thwart their workers going union. Despite that, UNITE HERE has continued to unionize hotel and casino workers not only in its Nevada stronghold and in such legacy cities as New York, but also in the otherwise non-union South. During Taylor’s presidency, the union not only organized 140,500 new workers, but fully half of them were in right-to-work states, which most unions shun for fear that workers benefiting from union contracts there would exercise their right not to pay union dues.
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