Hillary Clinton

Carmen Llarull is not a tall woman. She looked even tinier than usual standing on the back of a flatbed truck last August, with the gold and mirrored edifice of the 64-story Trump International Hotel looming behind her along the Las Vegas Strip. Speaking softly in Spanish, the 60-something Llarull addressed the boisterous group of red-clad protesters, telling them “we need to stop all intimidations if we want respect and justice.” The Trump Hotel housekeeper claimed she’d been fired from her job for wearing a Culinary Workers Union pin. “But I’m back here again, to fight for all of you.”

Nearly a year later, Llarull and more than 500 maids, bartenders and bellhops at the Trump International are still fighting the presidential candidate and his company. In early April, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified the Local Joint Executive Board of Las Vegas, a partnership of the powerful local Culinary Workers Union and the Bartenders Union, as the legal collective-bargaining representatives for hotel employees. Hotel management, however, has been dragging its feet on new contract negotiations.

The theme of the Culinary Workers Union’s campaign against Trump has been “Start here” (as in, to “Make America Great Again,” in the familiar words of his campaign): start with your own Las Vegas employees. According to organizers, management at Trump’s Vegas hotel has been aggressively anti-union, which they’ve documented in a flurry of NLRB complaints filed since 2014 that allege the hotel has threatened, fired or otherwise retaliated against workers trying to organize. It’s alleged that Trump management has even tried to block them from communicating.



The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment, but in legal correspondence and hearing transcripts obtained by Newsweek under the Freedom of Information Act, lawyers for Trump vigorously contested those claims. But Trump International Hotel’s decision to fight the Culinary Workers Union’s organizing effort at every turn certainly doesn’t suggest a company that’s union-friendly.