MUTH’S TRUTHS

Ah, the difference nine years makes. Nine years ago, businessman Phil Ruffin parachuted into Las Vegas to save the day for striking casino workers at the Frontier Hotel on the Strip. The long– running strike by Culinary Union malcontents and agitators was well-known for over-the-top union bombast, Strip-closing protests featuring the likes of Jesse Jackson, and unconscionable violence, harassment, property damage and intimidation. Indeed, cameras famously captured a union thug smashing the head of a tourist who dared to cross the picket-line with a beer mug.

All in a day’s work for the modern union movement.

Then along came Phil. The Kansas industrialist bought the Frontier for $165 million, immediately settled the strike and signed a new union contract. He was the darling of Big Labor…as opposed to that evil casino mogul down the street, Sheldon Adelson of the non-union Venetian Hotel.

But here’s something many Nevadans might not remember about Adelson. Before there was the Venetian, there was the Sands - an old Las Vegas Strip resort. Adelson closed down the Sands and blew it up in order to make way for the new Italian-themed mega-resort. And when he did, he paid all of the laid-off Sands employees, union workers at the time, a very generous severance package for their years of service to the old resort.

Fast-forward to today. Ruffin has now sold the aging and decrepit New Frontier for a whopping $1.2 billion. Nice return on investment, huh? Surely the darling of organized labor will share the lucre with the workers who helped make that profit possible right?

Wrong.

Ruffin has announced that there will be no severance pay for the soon to be out-of-work union workers. Ruffin told Michael Mishak of the Las Vegas Sun that it cost him a lot of money to keep those 900 union workers employed over the last nine years and he considers his debt to them paid in full. A Ruffin spokesman maintains Ruffin paid severance pay to the workers in advance by giving them back-pay when he originally bought the joint and the strike was ended.

But union boss D. Taylor thinks Ruffin owes the unionistas a “generous and magnanimous” severance package. Union greed knows no bounds.

I’m with Ruffin on this one. He took the risk when he bought the Frontier. He could have lost every dime he invested. Instead, he made a profit. A big one. And while he owned the place, his union workers with their union contract made a healthy living, as well. Ruffin’s under no obligation, morally or legally, to do anything more. He might still have a change of heart and cough up some extra dough, but if not, c’est la vie.

Nevertheless, I can’t help but marvel at how the Culinary union and union bosses such as D. Taylor continue to demonize the “anti”-union Sheldon Adelson who was WAY more generous to his union workers when he closed the Sands than the “pro”-union Phil Ruffin is being in closing the New Frontier. I guess all casino moguls aren’t created equal after all.

Posted on June 28th, 2007 by Chuck Muth
Filed under: Nevada