“No contract. No peace.” - Hattie Canty

In 1961 Hattie Canty moved to Las Vegas, Nevada with her husband and ten children. When her husband died suddenly in 1975, Canty became the sole provider and sought work as a janitor and maid in private homes. These jobs didn’t provide the health insurance she needed for herself and her children though so she began work at the Maxim hotel-casino as a maid and later a uniformed attendant. It was during this time that she joined the Culinary Workers Union 226 and participated in strikes demanding better work conditions and insurance benefits.

In 1984 Canty was elected to the executive board of the Culinary Workers Union and in 1990 to the union presidency. During her decade long presidency Hatty became known as one of the greatest strike leaders in U.S. history.

In September of 1991, Hatty lead a group of 550 culinary workers in a walk-off to protest unfair labor conditions at the New Frontier Hotel and Gambling Hall. The strike lasted 6 and a half years becoming the longest labor strike in U.S. history. Fighting the strike cost the owner of the New Frontier an estimated one billion dollars before she finally sold the property to a new owner who signed a contract with the union.

Canty’s leadership and tireless activism helped ensure that workers received the living wages needed to support themselves and care for their families. By the mid-1990s Las Vegas hotel employees were earning double the wages of service workers in other cities.

Hattie Canty considered one of her proudest achievements to be the founding of the Culinary Training Academy of Las Vegas in 1993. The academy provides thousands of students every year with the training needed to work in the hospitality industry.

Having grown up in Alabama, Canty had this to say about the labor and civil rights movements, “you cannot separate the two of them.”

View the complete Affirm Black Women portrait series here