Las Vegas’s Service and Restaurant Workers Deserve Better, and Universal Paid Leave is a Minimum.

Aug. 12, Las Vegas, NV — In the early morning hours of March 21, 2020, my wife and I packed up our two cats, and as much as we could fit in two suitcases, and caught a flight from Baltimore to Las Vegas. The deadly coronavirus had by then arrived in Washington, DC, our offices had closed, and our studio apartment had almost immediately become unworkable for us. We’d been welcomed to stay with family in southern Utah until the pandemic had passed. When we landed at McCarran Airport, I felt like I’d stepped into some apocalyptic movie.

Inside the airport, rows of slot machines sat empty, relics of a recent past in which public space itself was not thought to be dangerous. Those relative few of us arriving and departing shuffled past the machines and each other quickly — unsure yet as to how the virus moved from host to host. Nobody wanted to touch anything or linger in any space with others for too long. Outside, I realized, even The Strip was quiet. The casinos were there. But the cars, the tourists, the noise, the bustle, were gone. Vegas looked like a ghost town. The “lockdown” phase of the pandemic was beginning, and everything that makes Las Vegas feel like Vegas was either shutting down or being abandoned by the tourists they were meant to serve.

While the move across the country was difficult, my wife and I would be able to continue working remotely, and we had no disruption to our incomes. But for those hundreds of thousands who earn their living serving the tourists who would ordinarily be passing through McCarran, lockdown meant almost overnight economic devastation. Furloughs and layoffs came by the thousands. Without tourists and the casinos, shows, restaurants and more built to entertain them, there was no work, no tips, no income. As federal help for workers and businesses was phased in, some workers found temporary lifelines. Others pivoted as quickly as they could to other industries, or left the city entirely.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman raised eyebrows around the country in April of 2020 when she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that she would volunteer her city as a “control group” to test the consequences of reopening. As lockdowns were lifted in the coming weeks, it was Las Vegas’s more than 200,000 direct service workers who bore the brunt of the grand experiment of running a tourist-driven economy in an ongoing pandemic.

Masked, cautious, but eager to earn a living, these workers came back and got to it, even while many of the big questions about COVID-19 — its potential to produce more deadly variants, the discovery of effective vaccination, and whether the government would support them if the worst should happen — still remained. With a new set of stringent, complex and fast-changing rules to follow, workers not only implemented but enforced each new order from on high. They did so in the face of customers whose reactions to the new way of doing things ranged from understanding and accommodating to explosive and belligerent. Little by little, Vegas and its tourists followed these frontline workers back to something almost normal.

18 months after that dystopian landing at McCarran, it’s hard to imagine Vegas has ever been quiet, or that the pandemic is still spreading as quickly as ever. As a taxi driver told me, “Business has been good. Everything is back. There’s really no restriction on anything, as long as you wear a mask.”

But in reality, after everything Las Vegas’s service workers have done to keep business open through a pandemic, they are still fighting for the basic right to take time off for medical emergencies — their own and their family members’ — or major life moments like becoming parents — without losing the income they and their families rely on.

Just a mile off the strip at the Culinary Workers Union Hall, a small rally for paid family and medical leave prompted by the visit of the Paid Leave for All campaign bus told their story. Tourism might be back, but right now, Vegas isn’t working for the workers behind all this success. Jim Sullivan, political director of Culinary Workers Union Local 226, the local chapter of Unite Here hospitality workers union, spoke at the rally. Sullivan says many Vegas workers, “especially tipped workers,” he adds — must go to work even when they feel sick, in order to keep income coming in and their bills paid. That, he says, is not good for anyone--workers, businesses, or customers.

“We know that US workers and their families lose billions of dollars in wages each year due to lack of paid family and medical leave. Enough is enough. We need national paid leave now!” said Sullivan.

That’s one of many reasons the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Las Vegas’s hotels and restaurants, joined Make It Work Nevada, a local coalition of labor groups endorsing a paid family medical leave law that serves “all workers,” rather than the piecemeal unpaid federal and handful of paid local laws workers navigate today.

All this could change if congressional Democrats and the Biden administration follow through on their promises to deliver nationwide paid family and medical leave this year. In this pandemic, hospitality and service workers haven’t had the luxury of waiting — not for answers about the risks of COVID-19 to them on the job, or for guarantees of support or income if the worst should happen and they or their loved ones become ill. Paid family and medical leave in the United States is decades overdue. Frontline workers shouldn’t have to wait another day for it.

Visit PaidLeaveforAll.org and follow Paid Leave for All on Instagram and Twitter for more information on the bus tour and on ways to get involved in winning paid family and medical leave for all.

The views and opinions expressed by the authors of this series are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of New America.