A formidable Las Vegas union has sued several casino companies for putting workers at risk
When it comes to pandemics, what happens in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas. Photo: George Rose/Getty Images The Las Vegas strip is reopening. But the workers who make it function say their employers are putting them at risk of illness or even death. The city’s formidable Culinary Union announced on Monday that it had filed a lawsuit against three major casino companies for failing to take reasonable precautions to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
Flavortown, it seems, isn’t a paradise after all. Fieri, who’s best known as the hedgehog-haired host of the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, has an extensive partnership agreement with Caesars Entertainment. Fieri develops the concepts and menus with Caesars, which is presumably a lucrative enterprise for the inventor of donkey sauce. But while Fieri makes bank off Las Vegas, workers are getting sick.
The Culinary, a local of UNITE HERE, represents around 60,000 people in the hospitality-and-food industries in Las Vegas. In an email to Intelligencer, the union said that 19 of its members or their dependents have died of COVID-19 since the pandemic began, a toll it blames partly on negligent casinos and public officials. For two months, the union asked casinos to implement mandatory mask policies.
The union had already filed grievances against the three casinos named in its lawsuit. Each violated collective bargaining agreements “by adopting rules and procedures affecting workers’ health and safety that are unreasonable and that endanger worker’s safety,” the union claims. Workers have said that contact tracing is uneven and inadequate when it’s even performed.
Meanwhile, the Strip remains open. But workers may have more to fear in weeks to come. As COVID cases spike in southern and southwestern states, the threat of infection is a present danger, and since the pandemic first hit the U.S., local officials have been slow to care. “We would love to be that placebo side so you have something to measure against,” the city’s mayor, Carolyn Goodman, said to CNN’s Anderson Cooper during an April appearance his show.
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