unionizing casinos specifically the hospitality industry

Pushes to unionize often fail, because employers can deploy a range of extreme union busting tactics, and even break the law, with little repercussions. “You don’t see a way to improve your workplace because there isn’t a union, then you start looking for solutions.”īut while union efforts begin anew and some successes are celebrated, they are also hard-won. “If you enter the job market and you’re working at minimum wage, you don’t have job security,” Suisman said. gain, the risk of unionizing was eventually less than the vulnerability of living in poverty. Workers started organizing, a trend that led to last fall’s “striketober” - a month that saw the biggest nationwide bump in union activity in recent memory - and efforts to organize within large companies. Thousands faced layoffs or pay cuts with little to sustain them, thousands more continued to work despite safety risks. Suisman is an attorney at the Northwest Workers’ Justice Project, a nonprofit organization providing free legal services for low-income populations, and she says the pandemic exacerbated conditions that, for many, were already difficult. “It just became so much clearer that your average job, your average entry-level job, was really lacking in those basic promises that we used to think a job involved.” “It became like a lobster that is boiling slowly in water: we acclimated to it,” Suisman said. Over time, working conditions worsened until they were bad enough that a new generation arrived in the workforce and knew their jobs wouldn’t give them a viable future. W hen asked “why now” - why this moment for people to come together, to brave the risk of getting fired, the strain of psychological warfare in the workplace, to face the basic perils of union organizing - Kate Suisman posits it’s the result of a slow, steady decline.

Unionizing casinos specifically the hospitality industry