LAS
VEGAS — She begins her day in black, the natural black before dawn and
the requisite black of her uniform: the T-shirt, the pants, the socks,
the shoes with slip-resistant treads, all black. The outfit announces
deference.
She crams fresh vegetables into a blender and holds a plate over its mouth as the machine whips up her green liquid breakfast. Its whine sounds the alarm for her four school-age grandchildren who, one by one, emerge sleepwalking from corners of their crammed rented house.
Time to go. Before shepherding the children into her silver Jeep Patriot, the woman straps on a fabric back brace and covers it with the last piece of her uniform, a gray and black tunic. Then, above her left breast, she pins two small union buttons beside her silver name tag.
She crams fresh vegetables into a blender and holds a plate over its mouth as the machine whips up her green liquid breakfast. Its whine sounds the alarm for her four school-age grandchildren who, one by one, emerge sleepwalking from corners of their crammed rented house.
Time to go. Before shepherding the children into her silver Jeep Patriot, the woman straps on a fabric back brace and covers it with the last piece of her uniform, a gray and black tunic. Then, above her left breast, she pins two small union buttons beside her silver name tag.
The
combined effect says:
This is Celia. Underestimate her at your risk.
Celia Vargas, 57, with dark wavy hair restrained by a clasp, works at one of the hotels in perpetual gleam along and around the Strip. She is a “guest room attendant” and a member of the Culinary Union, one of more than 14,000 who clean hotel rooms while guests donate money to the casino of their choice.
This is Celia. Underestimate her at your risk.
Celia Vargas, 57, with dark wavy hair restrained by a clasp, works at one of the hotels in perpetual gleam along and around the Strip. She is a “guest room attendant” and a member of the Culinary Union, one of more than 14,000 who clean hotel rooms while guests donate money to the casino of their choice.
Photo
Celia Vargas, a guest room attendant at a hotel in Las Vegas, drove her grandchildren to school on Wednesday.
Credit
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Ms.
Vargas, who is from El Salvador, and her Latina union colleagues are a
growing force in the politics and culture of Nevada, vocal in their
beliefs and expectations. Their 57,000-member Culinary Union, a powerful
supporter of Nevada Democrats, is now 56 percent Latino — a jump from
35 percent just 20 years ago.
“The
power and courage of guest room attendants are the foundation and a big
source of strength of the Culinary Union,” Bethany Khan, the union’s
communications director, says. These workers, she adds, “are the
majority of the middle class in Nevada.”
Most
of the hotels on and around the Strip are union shops, but the one that
employs Ms. Vargas has yet to sign a contract. Even though its workers
voted to unionize last December, and even though it is violating the law
by not coming to the bargaining table — a point reinforced in a
decision and order issued on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board.
So Ms. Vargas wears her back brace, hidden, but also her buttons, prominent.
A
wooden rosary draped over the rearview mirror sways as her Jeep wends
through a working-class stretch of Las Vegas; this is not where Donny
and Marie live. She drops her grandchildren at their school, then goes
to the house of a friend from the Dominican Republic. She is standing
outside, dressed in the same black and gray.
The
Jeep drives deeper into the Vegas peculiarity, past the 7-Elevens and
massage parlors, the smoke shops and strip clubs. Soon the casino and
hotel giants of the Strip are framing the view, including one that
sticks out like a gold tooth in a wicked grin.
This
is where Ms. Vargas will clock in at 8:30, and where she is expected to
clean a checked-out room in less than 30 minutes and a stay-over in
less than 15. Every room seems to reveal something about the human
condition.
“Sometimes I open the door, and I say ‘Oh my God,’ ” Ms. Vargas says. “And then I close the door.”
Despite
their name tags, guest room attendants are anonymous. They go unnoticed
by many as they push their 300-pound carts to the next room, and the
next.
A
glimpse of what is expected of these attendants can be found at the
Culinary Academy of Las Vegas, a joint venture between the culinary and
bartenders unions and many properties along the Strip. Here, people are
trained as cooks or baker’s helpers, bus persons or bar apprentices — or
guest room attendants.
A
corner of the academy’s building features a series of mock guest rooms,
each one representing a specific hotel’s style: a Bellagio suite, an
MGM Grand, a Caesars Palace. Students learn how to lift mattresses
without injuring their backs; how to wear gloves while reaching with
care into wastebaskets; and how to maintain quality while moving
quickly, because there’s always another room.
“Get in and get out,” says Shirley Smith, a former guest room attendant who now trains others.
Consider
all the items on that cart. Linens, magazines, water bottles, coffee,
toiletries, tissues, magazines, glass cleaners, disinfectants,
bathrobes, dusters, a vacuum, and assorted brushes, including one for
the toilet and one for the crevices around the tub and shower.
Now consider the job itself.
“We
make the beds, dust, vacuum, mop, fill the coffee, the creamer, the
sugar,” Ms. Vargas says. “We wash the toilet, the bathtub, the shower,
the Jacuzzi. Worst, sometimes, is the kitchen. We clean the kitchen.”
All in a half-hour. Nine, 10, 11 times a day.
And
when her shift ends in the early evening, Ms. Vargas has often sweated
through her back brace and black T-shirt. Aching here there and
everywhere, she drives home and tells her family that Grandma needs to
lie down for a little bit.
Grandma’s
full name is Celia Menendez Vargas. She grew up in the city of Santa
Ana, the daughter of a soldier and a nurse. As civil war engulfed El
Salvador in the early 1980s, her husband was killed in a bus bombing,
and various family members fled to asylum in Canada and Australia. She
entrusted her two children to an aunt and sold her belongings to pay for
illicit transport to the United States. She was smuggled in a wooden
container on a truck bound for Los Angeles.
“Illegal,” she says. “Like a lot of people.”
She
worked for four years as a live-in housekeeper, applied for residency
and saved up the money to arrange for her two sons to join her legally.
She remarried, gave birth to a girl in 1986, divorced and kept working.
Newspaper deliverer. Garment factory worker. Babysitter. School
custodian. Food-truck cook, making pupusas, those Salvadoran corn
tortillas filled with cheese or meat or beans.
In
1996, Ms. Vargas became an American citizen. Her reasoning is familiar,
yet fresh: “For me this was very important. I always think this country
was the best for the future of my kids.”
Friends
were urging her to come to the soccer fields some Sunday and meet a man
who was also from Santa Ana, but her heavy work schedule precluded
romance. “Always working,” she says. “Working, work, work.”
They
met, finally, she and Jorge Alberto Vargas, and were married in 2003. A
few years later they moved to Las Vegas, on word that jobs were
plentiful in the neon oasis.
Mr.
Vargas, who had a work permit based on political asylum, became a chef
at a casino on the Strip, and things were fine until they weren’t. Three
years ago, he was detained after being arrested a second time for
driving under the influence, although the family maintains his second
arrest was a medical episode related to diabetes. He spent more than two
years being shipped to various federal detention centers — Nevada,
California, Texas, Louisiana — before being deported back to El Salvador
in July.
Ms.
Vargas saw him last a year ago, for 30 minutes; she cries at the
memory. She keeps his clothes boxed in the garage, and files document
after document with the government, working toward that day when they
might be reunited.
This
and other travails consume Ms. Vargas. But she has returned to the work
force, finding a job as a guest room attendant in this glittering gold
nonunion hotel. It paid a little more than $14 an hour — about $3 less
than what unionized housekeepers were making, and with nowhere near the
complement of benefits.
Some
of her colleagues began to agitate for a union vote. Union pamphlets
and cards were surreptitiously exchanged in the parking lot, in the
bathrooms, under tables in the employees’ dining room. Ms. Vargas joined
in, motivated in part by the $17,000 in debt she had accumulated by
undergoing surgery for breast cancer; she wanted better health care
benefits.
At
one point she and a few other workers were suspended for wearing union
buttons, but this concerted union activity is federally protected. After
the Culinary Union filed unfair labor practice charges with the
National Labor Relations Board, she was quickly reinstated with back
pay, her buttons intact.
It
has not been easy. Downsizing after her husband’s deportation, selling
her bedroom set, moving in with her daughter and her family. Publicly
agitating for the union — and for the Democratic nominee for president —
and then fretting that there might be retaliation at her nonunion,
pro-Republican workplace. And working, constantly working.
“I tell my children, we have to work,” Ms. Vargas says. “It’s not for government to support me. We work work work.”
She
pulls into the employee parking lot of the gold hotel, set aglow now by
the unsparing morning sun. Searching for a parking spot, she passes
other women, many of them also in black and gray tunics, hurrying toward
the service entrance.
Soon
she is heading for the same door, one more guest room attendant who
wears a back brace while cleaning rooms for a presidential candidate
whose name is on the bathrobes she stocks, on the empty wine bottles she
collects, on her name tag.
He will receive her labor, but not her vote.
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