Hattie Canty, born in rural Alabama in 1933, rose through the ranks in the hotel industry—from a maid to becoming the first Black woman to lead the Las Vegas Hotel and Culinary Workers Union. Through the union, Canty advocated for fair contracts and improved standard of living for Las Vegas’ hotel staffers.
“When I couldn’t go in the front door of houses I cleaned, I saw immediately that civil rights issues were linked to union issues, and why Martin Luther King had given up his life while trying to help the garbage workers organize,” she once said.
Canty saw the civil rights, labor and women’s rights movements as intertwined struggles.
“Anytime I fight for anything in this labor movement, it benefits me in the Civil Rights movement,” Canty said, according to Communications Workers of America (CWA) 1036.
In 1990, she was elected to lead Las Vegas’ Culinary Workers Union (CWU) local. The next year, she started the longest strike in American labor history at the New Frontier Hotel and Gambling Hall. This strike lasted six and a half years.
“Hattie Canty was one of the greatest strike leaders in U.S. history,” according to Culinary Union 226.
She was reelected to the position in 1993 and 1996.
She founded the Culinary Training Center in 1993, helping other women attain skills in the hospitality industry. This center is still in operation today.
“Ninety percent of our girls or ladies that go through that Culinary Training Center get jobs,” Canty said. “They know they’re going to get a job if they go through the Culinary Training Center. This is one true partnership that Culinary have with management in this town because management pays three-cent an hour for every hour that a worker works.”
During her tenure leading the CWU, Las Vegas maids and other hotel staff were paid nearly double what workers in other cities received. Canty died in 2012 in Las Vegas.
“The union taught me how to fight for what I needed and what I had, and if it was something I wanted, how to go after it,” Canty said.