Union Workers’ March Is an Uphill Battle : Labor: Las Vegas hotel strikers encounter bad weather and red tape on protest trek to L.A.

Trucks roared by Sonja Washington as she walked briskly along the shoulder of rural Interstate 15 Monday, bundled in gloves, ski cap and parka against the morning chill. She missed her 4-year-old daughter.

It had been hard to explain why she was leaving.

“I told her I was going on a march for the union,” said Washington, 29, a Las Vegas bartender on strike. “I told her we’re going to take our picket line a long way.”

Washington and nine other employees of the Frontier Hotel, where 550 union workers have been on strike for more than three months, are attempting to walk 280 miles to Los Angeles by mid-January to dramatize their labor dispute.

The march also is intended to call attention to the growing tendency by U.S. employers to hire permanent replacement workers immediately after a strike begins. Labor analysts say this pattern has turned many strikes into prolonged wars of attrition and eroded the collective bargaining power of labor unions. A bill to ban permanent replacements has passed the House but faces stronger opposition in the Senate.

Union leaders are trying to cast the march, which is scheduled to reach Ontario for a rally Jan. 16 and end in Los Angeles two days later, as reminiscent of the 1960s marches of the civil rights movement.

“This is the labor movement at its best,” said John Wilhelm, the chief negotiator for hotel workers in Las Vegas. “A human rights struggle. This is more than a typical wage dispute.”

But the reality has not proven as romantic as the idea of marching across the lonely desert in winter.

The members of Culinary Workers Local 226 and three smaller unions left Las Vegas on Saturday. Accompanied by a pair of motor homes for overnight accommodations and two union staff members, they slogged in the rain for the first two days and covered 28 miles, far below their goal of 20 miles a day.

On the narrow highway shoulder, hard by a strip of gravel and the desert brush beyond, marchers cannot walk more than double file. Some straggle as much as half a mile behind. There are no picket signs--they make it hard to walk.

An occasional horn sounds a honk of support, but mostly the marchers are ignored. Feet have begun to ache. Moleskin for blisters is now as important as solidarity.

The marchers enjoyed clear skies Monday but ran into a new obstacle in the afternoon when they came to the state line. In California, unlike Nevada, it is illegal to walk on the side of the freeway.

The protesters halted for the night while union officials tried to persuade California officials to waive the ban. Marchers said that if they cannot continue on I-15, they will begin walking on smaller, out-of-the way roads and ride in the motor homes where there is no alternate to the interstate.

Their strike against the 1,000-room Frontier is the first hotel strike on the Las Vegas Strip since an often-violent citywide action in 1984.

The Frontier dispute began in 1989 when the hotel’s owner, Margaret Elardi, refused to sign a contract similar to those at other large Strip hotels. Elardi--known in the gaming community as a no-frills operator who had turned the Frontier’s showroom into a coffee shop--demanded wage concessions. When the union refused she imposed her own terms, including lower wages, in early 1990. A few months later Elardi quit paying into a union pension fund, a move that a National Labor Relations Board administrative law judge last month ruled was a violation of federal law.

The unions, unable to pressure Elardi into rescinding the cuts, went on strike Sept. 21. Elardi immediately hired replacements.

Elardi’s hard-nosed tactics prompted another Strip hotel executive, Circus Circus Chairman Bill Bennett, to voice sympathy for the strikers in a local newspaper interview. “I just flat don’t blame those workers,” he said. “ . . . Virtually everything the hotel is demanding, I think is unfair.”

Many major American labor disputes of the past several years, including ones at Eastern Airlines, Greyhound and the New York Daily News, have turned into virtual death struggles because of the use of permanent replacements.

The most visible effect of such disputes is a drastic reduction in the number of U.S. strikes during the past decade. Most unions are not willing to take the risk of their members being permanently replaced.

“If you have to walk out as the last resort, you want to know that if you win the battle, you can go back and not be permanently replaced,” said a striker on the march, Frank Mullins, 35, a maintenance engineer at the Frontier.

Out on I-15 Monday, one striker tried to lift spirits by singing Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again.” The tune, and the effort, fell flat.

“Now you know why we work for a living,” another marcher said.