New Orleans Union Membership Set to Double After Hotel and Casino Workers Win

Kevin Solari

The Big Easy just saw a big bump in union membership. (vxla / Flickr)

The number of union members in New Orleans’s tourism industry is set to double. The hospitality and gaming union Unite Here and Teamsters Local 270 are in contract negotiations with Harrah’s Hotel and Casino after winning a card check election among 900 hotel and food workers.

According to the Times-Picayune:

The local Teamsters Union will represent the 150 or so employees who work the front of the hotel, bellmen, valets and front desk workers, as well as those in the hotel’s warehouse. Unite Here … will represent the remaining 750 employees, who work in housekeeping and food service.

About 70 percent of eligible employees expressed interest in union representation during a formal card check held in March, giving the unions legal authority to begin negotiations, said Scott Cooper, director and secretary-treasurer of Unite Here’s New Orleans local. 

With 70,000 tourism related jobs in the New Orleans area, and tourism accounting for almost $6.5 billion of New Orleans’ economy, unions have ample opportunity to expand in New Orleans. Unite Here currently has only three contracts in the city.

The decades-old struggle for labor unions in the South has been reinvigorated in recent years. The North Carolina State AFL-CIO has said the labor needs to organize the South or die.” Others have called for a Second Operation Dixie, referencing the CIO’s failed mission in the late forties and early fifties to unionize the old Confederacy. 

Conservative resistance runs deep, however. Earlier this year, the Unites Auto Workers lost a bid to organize the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee by a slim margin. When commenting on the defeat, South Carolina Governor and Tea Party favorite Nikki Haley said she discourages any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water.”

Please consider supporting our work.

I hope you found this article important. Before you leave, I want to ask you to consider supporting our work with a donation. In These Times needs readers like you to help sustain our mission. We don’t depend on—or want—corporate advertising or deep-pocketed billionaires to fund our journalism. We’re supported by you, the reader, so we can focus on covering the issues that matter most to the progressive movement without fear or compromise.

Our work isn’t hidden behind a paywall because of people like you who support our journalism. We want to keep it that way. If you value the work we do and the movements we cover, please consider donating to In These Times.

Kevin is an educator and freelance writer in Chicago. Follow him on Twitter at @kevinsolari_.
Illustrated cover of Gaza issue. Illustration shows an illustrated representation of Gaza, sohwing crowded buildings surrounded by a wall on three sides. Above the buildings is the sun, with light shining down. Above the sun is a white bird. Text below the city says: All Eyes on Gaza
Get 10 issues for $19.95

Subscribe to the print magazine.