What It’s Like To Fight For A Union When Your Boss Is Donald Trump
Updated On: Dec 21, 2015
Since 2012, Marisela Olvera has folded the towels, tucked in the sheets, and vacuumed the floors of 64-story, gold-plated Trump International Hotel just off the Las Vegas Strip. But unlike the tens of thousands of hospitality workers just like her across the city, her boss is running for president.
“He says he wants to make America great,” she told ThinkProgress in Spanish. “Well, he should start here in his own house, his own business. He always brags about how he has millions and millions and millions of dollars, but he pays his workers less than most in Las Vegas.”
This week, the hotel’s management refused to recognize the union and demanded the federal labor board throw out the results of the December 5th election, in which a majority of the 500-odd workers voted to be represented by Culinary Workers Union and Bartenders Union.
Eric Trump, the company’s executive vice president of development and acquisitions — and Donald Trump’s son — released a statement claiming “over 200 employees…stood up and categorically rejected union representation due, in large part, to the union’s many hostile, intimidating and dishonorable tactics.” When ThinkProgress reached out to attorneys hired by Trump as to what “tactics” they objected to, they said they were not authorized to speak about the case.
According to Olvera, a legal permanent resident who works from 4:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. five or more days a week, it was not the first sign the company would fight the union effort.
When the management at the Trump hotel caught wind of the union drive last year, they hired the “union avoidance” consulting firm Lupe Cruz and Associates. That company, which has busted union campaigns at American Apparel, the trucking company Conway, and some Hilton hotels, boasts on its website that it can help clients in “preserving a union free work place.”
Olvera told ThinkProgress that over several months, employees of Lupe Cruz held individual meetings with union organizers and so-called captive audience meetings with the entire staff to try to quash the union effort.
“They intimidated us a lot,” she said. “I know I can’t speak ill of the place where I work, but I’m allowed to speak the truth, and the truth is that they pressured us a lot [to vote no]. They told us the union only wants our money, that if we supported the union we’d lose our jobs, that the company would put our names on a blacklist and no other hotels in Las Vegas would hire us. They told us to think of what our children would do if we were out of work. Everyone was very stressed. People were afraid. But bendito sea Diós, we still won, even with all that pressure.”