According to the Online Nevada Encyclopedia from the Nevada Humanities Project, Hattie Canty is an African American labor unionist who worked to bring better pay and working conditions to women in the hotel and casino industry in the 1990s. This article provides primary source information directly from Canty’s time working with a union to secure better working conditions for women.
By Lou Cannon The Washington Post
November 30, 1997
A decisive union victory in the nation’s longest strike and the signing of a visionary contract at the world’s largest hotel-casino have boosted the fortunes of service workers on the lower rungs of the work force in this gambling mecca.
“Las Vegas, whatever else anybody says about it, has become a city where maids can own their homes and raise their families,” said Hattie Canty, president of Culinary Workers Union Local 226, a former maid and widowed mother of 10 who has done just that. Her union has claimed victory in a bitter labor dispute at the Frontier Hotel-Casino, where workers have been on strike since Sept. 21, 1991.
….Today, Local 226 has a squeaky-clean reputation and an image of diversity reflective of the industry. It maintains two training centers for workers, originally opposed and now financially supported by the hotels. More than half of the union’s members are women. Slightly more than a third of members are Latino, 30 percent are white, 12 percent black, 11 percent Asian and the others of mixed race.
Canty, an African American who raised her large family after her husband died of cancer 24 years ago, says the union has demonstrated that service workers can live in dignity.