No one expects billionaire investors to be on the right side of a labor dispute. A union, though, is different. Among the small number of other investors who own Virgin Hotels Las Vegas is the Laborers Union Pension Fund of Eastern and Central Canada.
“It was definitely a shock… that there was a labor union that was our owner,” said Pamela Holmes, a lead usher who helps guests buy tickets and find their seats at the hotel’s events.
After other efforts to contact the pension fund failed, Holmes and her colleagues went to the fund’s office in Toronto in hopes of talking worker to worker. “We went to the Laborers Union and were stopped by security,” she says. They were told that no one was available, but that security would take down their information. “We were there about four days and we never heard back from them.
“We went there hoping they weren’t doing it on purpose,” she said, “but it just seems like they knew and they didn’t want to talk to us.”
The pension fund has $8 billion in assets and an aggressive investment strategy. In an interview with the Canadian Business Journal, Laborers International Vice President Joseph Mancinelli said the union needed a higher return than the stock market had been providing, in order to cover the fund’s liabilities. So it has made multiple real estate investments.
“The Private Equity fund is doing somewhere around 14 percent to 15 percent as of now, but we think it has the potential to do even greater than that, and maybe above 20 percent,” he said. Among those investments is the Virgin Hotels Las Vegas.