Paid $13/Hr. to Sell $10 Beers, Super Bowl Stadium Workers Launch Organizing Drive
“Just pay us, Baby!” Allegiant Stadium workers send the Las Vegas Raiders a simple message ahead of this Sunday’s Super Bowl showdown. Photos courtesy of Culinary Union, UNITE HERE Local 226.
By Steve Wishnia
Just days before the start of Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas, Nevada’s Culinary Union announced a drive to organize the about 1,500 nonunion workers at Allegiant Stadium, site of this year’s gridiron showdown between the 49ers and Chiefs.
The Super Bowl is “great for everybody, except many of the workers at the stadium,” UNITE HERE President D. Taylor said February 6 at the headquarters of the Culinary Union, Local 226. The Culinary Union, together with the Bartenders Union, Local 165, represents about 60,000 workers at Nevada hotels and casinos, primarily in Las Vegas and Reno.
Before the Raiders moved from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020, Taylor continued, they got $750 million in public funds to help build a new stadium.
“We were promised good jobs,” he said, but instead, got “workers making $13 an hour, with no medical benefits. When the Raiders were in Oakland, all these jobs were union.”
The nonunion jobs include concession-stand workers, ticket-takers, ushers, and cleaners at the 65,000-seat Allegiant Sttadium. “We don’t have the basic stuff,” said David Martinez, clad in a red union T-shirt, who makes $14.25 an hour as a lead cashier. The father of four children, he said he hasn’t gotten a raise after two years on the job, and “last year, I had no vacation or [health] insurance benefits.”
If the Raiders’ players have a union, he asks, why can’t stadium workers?
“We need to be here for you,” NFL Players Association President JC Tretter, a retired offensive lineman for the Green Bay Packers and Cleveland Browns, told the stadium workers.
UNITE HERE asked the Raiders for a neutrality agreement last month. Team president Sandra Douglass Morgan responded on Jan. 25 that “the Raiders organization will always respect the legal right of employees to select a bargaining representative of their choosing.” However, she added that she could not speak for the more than 25 independent companies that employ workers in the stadium.
Allegiant Stadium worker David Martinez speaks out against low wages alongside NFL Players Association President JC Tretter (dark shirt, beard), UNITE HERE President D. Taylor (union vest) and fellow trade unionists.
Those companies include ABM Industries, which hires stadium cleaners; S.A.F.E. Management, ushers and ticket-takers; Levy, which operates concession stands and has both union and nonunion workers; and about two dozen restaurants and food stands.
“In the four years I've worked at Allegiant Stadium, we haven't seen a raise, and that's not fair,” said Vickey Powell, who makes $13 an hour as a Levy cashier. The lack of vacation days, she said, meant that when her son died in 2021, she had to go in to work when “I should have been planning his funeral.”
“None of the promised benefits materialized,” said Florenda Tullao, who left a union job to work at the stadium as a lead cashier for Levy. After four years on the job, she makes $14.25 an hour. “Las Vegas was told we'd have real jobs with decent wages, not unlivable wages. Juggling multiple jobs should not be our reality.”
According to Local 226, ABM Industries advertises custodial jobs at Allegiant for $15 per hour, while union custodians at casinos on the Las Vegas Strip earn $25.24 — and the stadium custodians can’t work full-time, only when there are events available. Levy pays its nonunion cashiers $13 per hour, while union cashiers at the Las Vegas Convention Center make $23.54. S.A.F.E. Management starts ticket-takers at $13.25 per hour, “well below the wage for any union job of any kind at the Las Vegas Convention Center.”
Tullao said she sometimes works 50 hours in a week, but doesn’t qualify for health insurance because the work is intermittent. “How can we work full-time and still be considered seasonal?” she asks.
The workers’ low pay contrasts sharply with the cost of going to games. The cheapest Super Bowl tickets available on resale-market websites a week before kickoff cost almost $5,500, CBS Sports reported. The average price, a StubHub spokesperson told KTNV-TV in Las Vegas, was around $9,500. Last September, Bookies.com rated Raiders regular-season home games the most expensive in the NFL, with the cheapest tickets costing about $310, parking $100, a 16-ounce beer $10, soda $7.20, and a hot dog $3.
The stadium cost almost $2 billion to build. The public share came from $750 million in bonds issued by Clark County, the Las Vegas metropolitan area. The Nevada Independent news site called that “the single largest-ever pot of public money for a stadium project in the U.S.” The county imposed a tax on hotel rooms in 2017 intended to pay the bonds off over the next 30 years.
Goal Line Stand: Members of Culinary Union Local 226 are digging in their heels ahead of Super Bowl Sunday.
Last June, the state legislature approved up to $380 million in public funding, a mix of tax credits and bonds, to help the Oakland Athletics build a new stadium for their planned move to Las Vegas.
“The Culinary Union urges the Las Vegas Raiders, who got $750 million of taxpayers money to build their stadium, to support workers in their call for a fair organizing process,” secretary-treasurer Ted Pappageorge said in a statement released by the union.
“We won’t leave any worker behind,” Culinary Union President Diana Valles vowed. “The Las Vegas Strip is 100% union from the Fontainebleau, the Sphere, the Venetian, and to the new A’s stadium.”
Taylor said his experience in Las Vegas has been that “a lot of companies and owners in this town never listen to us, until we elevate the kind of actions we do.”