We get what we organize and fight to take

Vegas, unions, and raising expectations

Hi everyone, I’ve been keeping everything un-paywalled for a few months now. That will generally continue, but I do want to move this project towards being sustaining, so today will be the exception. I hope you’ll consider pitching in, but if you can’t we’ll resume our regularly scheduled programming later this week. - JP

---

I just went to Vegas for the first time, and I was totally unprepared. The movies romanticizing the casinos and the nightlife and the gambling hadn’t readied me for the dominance of the slot machine, hadn’t readied me for thousands of people pushing the same button again and again, handing money over to giant gaming corporations in exchange for some cheesy animations on a screen. From the airport to the Bellagio, the crappy slot machines are the same, dominating millions’ of people’s experience of the city.

I also hadn’t been prepared for the indoor smoking, for the cost of everything on the Strip, or for the fake skies. Several establishments, like Caesar’s Palace and The Venetian, are not just casinos and hotels, but also gigantic malls. Filled with international brands, and gimmicks like shoddy recreations of the canals of Venice or the plazas of Rome, these buildings seem to go on and on, endless halls of consumption. And, either in an attempt to be distinctive or to make you content with being inside these characterless behemoths for countless hours, the ceilings have fake skies.

Both of those were taken indoors. After an hour or two in each establishment I had a visceral reaction, a feeling of my body rejecting the falsehood and needing the sun. That sums up about half of my experience in Vegas. Thankfully, there’s another half. The good part included getting off the Strip, and beyond that narrow plot there was some real inspiration. It turns out that in the belly of the beast, in the heart of a hyper-capitalist tourist trap, workers are doing some of the most incredible organizing in the entire country, launching projects most of us can only dream of.