With only two weeks to go until the election, Marisela Olvera paused at a house on the end of a cul-de-sac in Las Vegas. In the two months she had spent canvassing neighborhoods for Kamala Harris, she had seen a lot, but nothing quite like this. In the front yard, near a Trump flag emblazoned with the word FIGHT, an artificial saguaro cactus rose from the cement, transformed to represent Trump as a working-class everyman. A yellow reflective construction shirt was draped over the limbs of the faux cactus arms, a Trump mask resting on top. This was clearly not, in the parlance of canvassers, a persuadable voter. Olvera moved down the street.
The 52-year-old immigrant from Mexico, however, would have had a unique perspective to share. A decade ago, she had improved her life by organizing a union at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, where she was a housekeeper and at times cleaned the penthouse where Trump stayed while in town. But she did it against the fierce resistance of the Trump Organization — which co-owned and managed the hotel — and at the exact moment when Donald Trump was running as the Republican nominee for president and presenting himself as a champion of workers. The union-organizing campaign launched in mid-2015, around the time Trump announced his candidacy for president. The company would go on to spend more than $500,000 on anti-union consultants and face allegations by the National Labor Relations Board of retaliating against union supporters. The company also unsuccessfully challenged the results after workers voted the union in and initially refused to bargain a contract.
“It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of fear,” recalled Olvera, who spent months alongside her colleagues in marches and protests in support of the union-organizing campaign. Today, she remains an employee at the Trump Hotel and credits the Culinary Workers Union — which has secured higher wages, health insurance and a pension — with transforming her life. She jumped at the chance to take a two-month leave of absence at the hotel to campaign for Kamala Harris, along with hundreds of fellow members of the powerful CWU, also known as UNITE HERE Local 226. (Disclosure: UNITE HERE is a financial supporter of Capital & Main.)
Capital & Main reached out to the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign for comment but did not receive a response.
“It’s important for a president to be pro-union,” said Olvera. “Without a union, a worker invests the majority of their time at work only to find they can’t afford health care for their kids. They leave work tired, have to work two jobs and still find that the money isn’t enough.”
According to Ted Pappageorge, the secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union, the anti-union campaign at the Trump International Hotel foreshadowed a Trump administration that would prove to be consistently hostile to unions.
“In Las Vegas, the company brought in union busters and consultants to dissuade folks,” Pappageorge said, referring to the $560,631 the hotel paid to an anti-union firm. During the course of the campaign, a National Labor Relations Board judge found that Trump management illegally surveilled, interrogated, and threatened pro-union workers, calling one a “traitor” for wearing a union button. And one month before Trump accepted the GOP presidential nomination, his company agreed to pay a $11,200 settlement to one worker who was fired and another who was denied a transfer to a full-time job, allegedly due to their union activity.
Trump has aggressively courted union voters, promising to improve their lives. In a recent media stunt, he donned an apron and briefly manned the fry station at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. During his first campaign, in 2016, he proclaimed, “The unions love me.”
But during his administration, the NLRB issued decisions that made it easier for employers to fire or discipline employees, weakened rules to streamline union elections, and made it more difficult to hold corporations accountable for violations committed by subcontractors, as Capital & Main has previously reported. Under Trump, the agency also sought, unsuccessfully, to ban graduate students from organizing, which would have stymied a burgeoning campus labor movement that has added 44,000 student workers to the union ranks since 2022.
Olvera first learned about unions in the California fields. At 14, she moved from Mexico to Salinas, where she harvested lettuce and broccoli alongside her parents and siblings for more than a decade. The shifts were long and the pay meager — just $3.25 an hour when she started — but she joined the United Farm Workers union in an effort that forced growers to provide clean drinking water and accessible bathrooms.
In 2010, she moved to Las Vegas; two years later, she was hired as a housekeeper at the Trump International Hotel. By then, she was a single mother of two teenage boys, and her $13-an-hour wage didn’t cover basic expenses. She paid about $200 a month for health care, mostly to cover her kids, who needed proof of insurance to play the school sports they loved. She took a second job cleaning homes and offices. In all, she was putting in 65 hours a week. The schedule hearkened back to her farmworker days, when it wasn’t uncommon to work 12-hour shifts. “It wears you down,” said Olvera. “You look older than you are. I’d eat my lunch in the car while driving to my second job.”
Olvera knew of the Culinary Workers Union, whose members earned higher wages and enjoyed employer-paid health care and a pension. “I asked God to allow the union to come,” she said. By 2014, she was no longer asking but demanding, wearing a union button to work and organizing her fellow workers on the swing shift. In December 2015, the workers voted in the union, though Trump and hotel managers, reported the Los Angeles Times, “refused to negotiate, assailing the vote as rigged,” a strategy that echoes Trump’s claims about the 2020 election.
Every objection the hotel made against the union was either dismissed by the NLRB or withdrawn, and the union finally signed a contract in December 2016. This January, the union inked a new five-year contract with the Trump Hotel, which will see wages rise an average of 32% over the period while maintaining employer-paid health care and pensions for workers.
Olvera isn’t one to dwell too much on the past. Though she can still recall the struggle to organize her workplace, her energy is now focused on Harris.
“I want to be a small part of history in getting the first woman elected,” she said, walking to the next house on her canvassing route. She is excited by Harris’ policies, like the $25,000 down payment for first-time homebuyers. The Culinary Workers Union, in fact, has a nearly identical housing assistance program for members, which Olvera used to buy her first home. She also agrees with Harris on protecting reproductive rights and, of course, her support of policies like the PRO Act that would make it easier for workers to form unions by, among other steps, prohibiting captive audience meetings and citing employers who violate labor laws with civil penalties.
But what really motivates her, she said, is the example that Harris, whose parents were immigrants, provides for people like Olvera’s two sons, now in their 30s. “She worked at a McDonald’s, and look how far she’s gone,” she said. “I come from a culture that believes work makes you strong. I believe that with work, no matter how humble, you should be able to move forward.”
