With the unionized share of the private-sector workforce now down to a bare 6 percent, it’s not easy to find places where a union culture is pervasive enough to help shape their members’ politics. An exception that somewhat proves this rule is that of UNITE HERE in Las Vegas—a 60,000-member local of hotel workers in a city where hotels dominate the economy, a city that’s hundreds of miles from any other big city. In that kind of environment, workers’ appreciation of the importance of maintaining and expanding the union’s strength is very real. That level of worker understanding, of course, is also the result of decades of union leaders’ strategically savvy and constant efforts to create the kind of intra-union culture where such understanding is widespread.
