Station Casinos workers seek refuge with Culinary Union

By Michael Mishak

Culinary Union staff member Mickey Ituarte chants during a rally and picket line organized by the Culinary Union Local 226 to condemn Station Casinos’ anti-union campaigns in front of Palace Station in Las Vegas Thursday, March 11, 2010

For more than a decade, Station Casinos has dismissed the Culinary Union’s efforts to organize its employees as a waste of time, a fruitless search for more dues-paying members. And with no visible support for the Culinary campaign, the company said the message was clear: Station workers simply aren’t interested in the union.

If that was the case, worker attitudes appear to be changing.

For the first time, employees are going public, wearing Culinary buttons on the job, talking to co-workers about the labor organization and circulating union cards throughout Station’s 10 largest casinos. Workers say their support is the result of a number of cost-cutting moves Station has undertaken as it navigates bankruptcy, including the suspension of 401(k) matching and increases in health care premiums.

Most disturbing, they say, is the expansion of subcontracted restaurants, which has resulted in the firing of longtime employees.

“Every day we come in in fear,” said Wayne Brasher, a bartender at Boulder Station. “What happened to the kitchen worker? What happened to the uniform attendant? Are we next? Everybody feels like they’re next”.

Organizers say management has responded by threatening, intimidating and firing union supporters. The Culinary has filed charges against the company with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging more than 100 instances of unfair labor practices. Labor leaders say Station supervisors are targeting union supporters, changing or withholding shifts, offering extra pay and threatening termination to kill the campaign.

The federal labor board is investigating the allegations.

Station declined to comment on the charges.

On Thursday, Station workers joined hundreds of Culinary members in a picket at Palace Station, one of the company’s largest properties, calling on the locals casino giant to recognize and respect workers’ organizing rights. Maria Jessica Corona, a buffet cook at Aliante Station, said organizers like herself face an uphill battle.

“Most people want the union, but they are scared of losing their job,” she said.

Not surprisingly, the rhetoric is hot on both sides.

D. Taylor, secretary-treasurer of the Culinary, said the company is engaged in a “reign of terror,” predicting that by campaign’s end, “Station will be the most egregious violator of labor law in the hotel and casino industry in modern times”.

Station spokeswoman Lori Nelson fired back, suggesting the union support at Station was artificial, the picket “a continuation of the Culinary Union’s 13-year campaign of harassment against our company.” The company, she said, has “always treated our employees with dignity, fairness and respect” and recognizes workers’ rights to join a union.

Nelson highlighted Station’s distinction as one of Fortune Magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For”four years in a row, through 2008. She also noted the company’s on-site child care and its in-house programs to help employees purchase homes and become citizens.

“We’re not anti-union,” she said. “We’re pro-employee”.

Of the allegations that restaurant workers have been fired, Nelson said Station closed 10 casino-operated restaurants over the past 18 months, leasing the spaces to Denny’s and Coco’s.

She said the company struck a deal with the chain operators at the time to retain a majority of Station workers at equal pay and hours. Nelson said she was unaware of any subsequent changes the chain restaurants made.

Station’s bankruptcy seems to be driving the intensity of both parties.

For the Culinary, the reorganization presents a strategic opening. The union has used bankruptcy proceedings in the past to outmaneuver hostile employers.

In 2000, the Aladdin opened nonunion and fought the Culinary’s organizing efforts. But when the debt-laden company filed for Chapter 11, its expenditures, including those for management-labor lawyers, became subject to court approval. The union then stepped up its campaign, staging protests and filing complaints of unfair labor practices.

Likewise, as Station battled with its lenders in court last year, the Culinary effectively aligned itself with a group of aggrieved creditors, blaming a management-led buyout for the company’s bankruptcy filing. The union issued a detailed report on Station’s financial woes, arguing that the company could have avoided bankruptcy had it not pursued a $5.7 billion deal to take the company private in 2007.

It concluded with a call for creditors to demand that Station’s owners reinvest a significant portion of the profits from the deal to help the company recover.

Station dismissed the report as “silly” and maintained that its reorganization is the result of the recession, not the terms of its leveraged buyout.

But the union’s campaign seems to be having an effect.

After months of legal wrangling, Station announced last month that it had reached a deal with key lenders that could clear the way out of bankruptcy this summer. The announcement came on the same day the Culinary went public with its organizing campaign, led by hundreds of Station employees companywide.

Under the deal, Station Chairman and CEO Frank Fertitta III and his brother Lorenzo Fertitta, would make a substantial but undisclosed equity investment, and the current management team would continue to lead the company.

Indeed, Nelson cited a union mailer with the heading “Now or Never,” saying “they recognize we will be even stronger when we emerge from bankruptcy”.

The Culinary hopes to capitalize on public outrage over the bank bailouts, pitching its organizing campaign in populist terms. Taylor said company insiders, led by the Fertitta family, nearly tripled Station’s long-term debt to take the company private, netting more than $660 million in the process.

“It’s exactly why people are angry in this country,” Taylor said. “The very few ran off with a ton of money and we’re all having to pay for it. Now, the people who made off with the money are saying they shouldn’t have to pay it back. Station went into bankruptcy and the creditors and the workers have been left with the bag. Workers are fighting back”.

Station, meanwhile, is using the Great Recession against the Culinary, noting that it has lost thousands of members through layoffs and hour reductions.

“We’re surprised that the Culinary Union’s leadership continues to spend its members’ dues on stunts like this instead of using their resources to find jobs for thousands of unemployed Culinary members,” Nelson said.

“It’s disingenuous to tell our team members they can provide job security for them when the facts demonstrate that the Culinary cannot provide job security for its own members”.

The union acknowledges the limits of its job protections. But Taylor emphasized an important distinction: Laid-off Culinary members retain their seniority and have the benefit of recall rights in the event a company starts hiring again.

Contracts, he said, also ensure union representation at most subcontracted operations.

Las Vegas Sun

Fearing Drug Cartels, Reporters in Mexico Retreat

By Marc Lacey

REYNOSA, Mexico — The big philosophical question in this gritty border town does not concern trees falling in the forest but bodies falling on the concrete: Does a shootout actually happen if the newspapers print nothing about it, the radio and television stations broadcast nothing, and the authorities never confirm that it occurred?

As two powerful groups of drug traffickers engaged in fierce urban combat in Reynosa in recent weeks, the reality that many residents were living and the one that the increasingly timid news media and the image-conscious politicians portrayed were difficult to reconcile.

“You begin to wonder what the truth is,” said one of Reynosa’s frustrated and fearful residents, Eunice Peña, a professor of communications. “Is it what you saw, or what the media and the officials say? You even wonder if you were imagining it”.

Angry residents who witnessed the carnage began to fill the void, posting raw videos and photos taken with cellphones.

“The pictures do not lie,” said a journalist in McAllen, Tex., who monitors what is happening south of the border online but has stopped venturing there himself. “You can hear the gunshots. You can see the bodies. You know it’s bad”.

The Mexican government’s drug offensive, employing tens of thousands of soldiers, marines and federal police officers, has unleashed ever increasing levels of violence over the last three years as traffickers have fought to protect their lucrative smuggling routes. Journalists have long been among the victims, but the attacks on members of the media now under way in Reynosa and elsewhere along a long stretch of border from Nuevo Laredo to Matamoros are at their worst.

Traffickers have gone after the media with a vengeance in these strategic border towns where drugs are smuggled across by the ton. They have shot up newsrooms, kidnapped and killed staff members and called up the media regularly with threats that were not the least bit veiled. Back off, the thugs said. Do not dare print our names. We will kill you the next time you publish a photograph like that.

“They mean what they say,” said one of the many terrified journalists who used to cover the police beat in Reynosa. “I’m censoring myself. There’s no other way to put it. But so is everybody else”.

When they are not issuing threats, journalists say, the drug runners are buying off reporters with everything from cash to romps with prostitutes. The traffickers are not always so press shy. When they post banners on bridges expounding on their twisted view of the world or commit some particularly gory crime, they often seek out media coverage.

But not now. And the current news blackout along the border has only amplified fears, as false rumors of impending shootouts circulate unchecked, prompting many parents to pull their children from school and businesses to close.

It means that a mother can huddle on the floor of a closet with her daughter for what seems like eternity as fierce gunfire is exchanged outside their home, as occurred here recently, and then find not a word of it in the next day’s paper.

And it means that helicopters can swoop overhead, military vehicles can roar through the streets and the entire neighborhood can sound like a war movie, and television can lead off the next day’s broadcast talking about something else. Even some authorities, including Mayor Óscar Lubbert of Reynosa, acknowledge that without news reports, it is harder for them to get a full picture of how much blood is spilled overnight, partly because the traffickers sometimes haul their dead comrades away before the sun comes up.

The violence was so fearsome last month that the American Embassy in Mexico City temporarily closed the consular agency in Reynosa, which offers assistance to Americans, many of whom manage the hundreds of manufacturing plants based here. Closed on Feb. 24, the office reopened on March 8 after a lull in the bloodshed, which has continued sporadically in recent days with clashes between traffickers and the police.

What remains unclear is whether the combatants have called it quits or are merely reloading for more battles to come.

Rarely, if ever, do the local news media mention the names of the groups engaged in combat or their top leadership. The Texas press broke the story that the Drug Enforcement Administration traced the upsurge in violence in Reynosa to Jan. 18, when a member of the Gulf Cartel killed a top lieutenant of the rival Zeta gang named Victor Mendoza. The Zetas, founded by former members of the Mexican special forces and known for both their organization and their brutality, demanded the shooter. The Gulf Cartel, which once used the Zetas as enforcers but now vows to eliminate them, refused.

In the weeks that followed, fierce shootouts broke out along long stretches of the border, and the local reporters went silent.

“Before, if there was a shootout, the scene would be full of journalists,” said one of the many reporters who has given up covering the drug war here out of fear and who insisted on anonymity for the same reason. “Now, sometimes there will not be a single journalist. Everyone stays away”.

The fear extends to the Texas side of the border, where most news organizations now bar their journalists from crossing into Reynosa. When journalists do try to get a glimpse of Reynosa’s underbelly, bad things can happen. A reporter and camera man working for Mexico City-based Milenio TV were picked up by traffickers early this month and viciously beaten overnight, prompting them to catch the next flight out.

Days later, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News quickly left Reynosa after he and a television crew were approached by a man on the streets who warned them they lacked permission to report there and ordered them to leave.

They were the lucky ones. A local radio reporter died recently from a beating, according to local journalists, who say five other colleagues have disappeared in the last month. The authorities have confirmed only one of the disappearances, that of Miguel Ángel Domínguez Zamora of Reynosa’s newspaper El Mañana, who disappeared March 1.

“We’re all watching our backs,” said a Reynosa journalist, whose voice trembled as he spoke.

One troubling aspect of the kidnappings and killings of journalists in Mexico is that nobody knows for sure which cases involve crusading reporters doing their jobs in revealing the truth and which involve careless or crooked reporters who had become too close to one cartel or another.

“It’s understandable and worrying that you have a number of media organizations that are likely under the sway, either by corruption or intimidation, of the cartels,” said an American official keeping tabs on the violence who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Ciro Gómez Leyva, the news director at Milenio who had sent the crew to Reynosa, wrote an angry column recently taking President Felipe Calderón to task for his declaration that no part of the country was outside the control of the government. “Journalism is dead in Reynosa,” Mr. Gómez declared flatly.

The violence and what it has done to the news media has become, by necessity, a part of journalism instruction along the border. At one Reynosa university, communications professors talk about the importance of staying neutral and how it can be deadly to take sides. They also steer their students, until the climate along the border changes, into jobs covering politics, culture or sports. Anything but crime.

The New York Times

Troops with malaria could face punishment for disobeying orders

By Seth Robson, Stars and Stripes 

CARREFOUR, Haiti — Servicemembers who contracted malaria in Haiti could be punished for failing to follow the prevention protocol, according to the Joint Task Force overseeing earthquake relief operations here.

Last week, the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit confirmed that two Marines deployed to Haiti had contracted malaria. Ten soldiers have also come down with the disease during the relief operation, according to U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Amber Cargile, deputy public affairs officer for Joint Task Force Haiti.

On Thursday, 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment commander Lt. Col. Robert Fulford, 39, briefed Marines about the malaria cases and reminded his men to keep taking their anti-malaria pills.

The Marines working in Carrefour, a medium-sized city just up the coast from Port-au-Prince, are under constant attack by mosquitoes, which transmit malaria through their bites. To protect themselves, the Marines are told to use repellent, sleep under mosquito nets and take doxycycline anti-malaria pills daily. That should be an effective preventive approach, but “nothing is 100 percent effective,” said Dr. Larry Slutsker, chief of the malaria branch at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Just as with the measles vaccine or any kind of protection, nothing is perfect,” Slutsker said.

Medics assigned to the 82nd Airborne Brigade said last month that missing more than one dose of the daily medication could leave a person vulnerable to malaria.

Marines in Carrefour said they’ve been told they could face nonjudicial punishment, for disobeying an order to take their daily anti-malaria pills, if they contract the disease.

Cargile said the decision to punish a servicemember in such circumstances would be up to individual unit commanders based on the circumstances of each case.

22nd MEU public affairs officer Capt. Binford Strickland said Haiti is known for hosting vector-borne illnesses such as malaria.

“The 22nd MEU has always and will continue to take malaria prevention seriously, and our application of preventive medicine will remain very proactive,” he said.

Medical personnel diagnosed both malaria cases last week, Strickland said, adding that the infected Marines received immediate treatment with anti-malaria medicine.

“We are confident these isolated cases will have a positive outcome as the form of malaria in this part of the world can be eliminated from the bloodstream when diagnosed early,” he said, adding that both infected Marines are expected to recover.

Every Marine and sailor has been educated on the requirements for taking the preventative medication and risks associated with failing to follow regimented care. Unit leaders are responsible for setting procedures for taking anti-malaria pills, Strickland said.

“The MEU medical personnel issue prophylaxis to the Marines and sailors, and unit leaders ensure they take the pill at a consistent point every day,” he said.

Procedures vary from using mass formations to ensuring that each Marine signs for his pill, and takes it in the company of others, he said.

Stars and Stripes reporter Jeff Schogol contributed to this report

Stars and Stripes

New parachute integrated at Airborne School

By Tiffany Nabors, The Bayonet 

The 453 students in C Company, 1st Battalion (Airborne), 507th Parachute Infantry Regiment, exited the 34-foot training tower twice as many times as the normal requirement March 3.

The change is one of several resulting from the new T-11 parachute system integration at the U.S. Army Airborne School. The new parachute replaces the T-10 system that has been in use since the 1950s and will be phased out over the next 15 years, said 1st Sgt. Christopher Goodrow, C Co., 1st Bn., 507th PIR.

Goodrow said students are getting trained on both systems. They will jump six times with the T-10 and T-11 parachutes and receive eight passing evaluations instead of four.

The T-11 design should decrease injuries and has an increased weight tolerance for heavier combat loads and a decreased descent pace for softer landings, Goodrow said.

The square shape of the T-11 is easily identified compared to the T-10's circular shape, and it features a slider component that separates lines and reduces the possibility of inversion.

"It eliminates many of the malfunction possibilities we had with the T-10," Goodrow said. "This has been needed for a long time. For the Airborne community, I think this is a leap into the 21st century".

Few units have been conducting jumps with the T-11, but many Airborne units will see the new parachutes fielded by the end of the year, making this the right time to phase it into the school, said Capt. Dean Gibson, C Company commander.

"It's important to train students on the T-11 parachute system before they arrive at their units," he said. "So once they get there, their focus is on becoming combat-ready".

During week one, also known as ground week, Soldiers learn to put on a parachute, exit a mock door and perform parachute landing fall and recovery methods.

Adaptations have been required for instructors, known as Black Hats. 

"We've been training for about six months," said Staff Sgt. James Patterson, a Black Hat for two years. "We had to relearn our classes and relearn our demonstrations before we could pitch the class to our students".

Maj. Douglas Hoover, the Maneuver Center of Excellence Family Life c haplain, who is currently in the school, said he admired the dedication of the staff.

"I feel more for the cadre because they have to get the same amount of material in on both systems," he said, adding he was excited about being in the first class of trainees. 

Sgt. Michael Holbein, who is in the Air Defense Artillery branch, said he was a little nervous about exiting a plane, but its something he's wanted to do for a long time. "(The training) is repetitious, but it's beneficial," Holbein said. "It becomes muscle memory so that when I do jump, I'll know how to do the right thing".

Staff Sgt. Benjamin Thurman, who has been a Black Hat for 18 months and has completed 15 cycles, said the 34-foot tower used during ground week exposes students to the shock of free falling and the catch of the parachute and gives them a point of reference.

"This is a good time and a good place to conquer your height fears," Thurman said. "If you can jump from 34 feet, you can definitely jump from 1,250 feet".

During week two or tower week, the students will descend from the 250-foot tower.

U.S. Army