By Gabriel Thompson for Capital & Main.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Nevada News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

By Gabriel Thompson for Capital & Main.
Broadcast version by Alex Gonzalez for Nevada News Service reporting for the Rural News Network-Public News Service Collaboration

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."


This story was originally produced by Gabriel Thompson of Capital & Main as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.

This story was originally produced by Gabriel Thompson of Capital & Main as part of the Rural News Network, an initiative of the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), supporting more than 475 independent, nonprofit news organizations.


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Wisconsinites overwhelmingly voted 'yes' on a record number of school funding measures, according to a new Wisconsin Policy Forum study. The appeals essentially asked voters to increase their own property taxes to fund school operations across the state. Voters favored a record number 169 referendums, authorizing a record total of $4.4 billion in new funding for 145 school districts.

Denise Gaumer Hutchison, Northwest regional organizer with the Wisconsin Public Education Network, said districts are being forced to take their needs to the ballot box to fund gaps between prioritizing students and overdue bills.

"The first responsibility of our public schools across the state is to educate children and to take care of the kids and the families they serve, every single day," she said. "So, that means any available funds that public schools have they put toward educating children. And so, if that means a boiler has to be patched rather than replaced, that's what they're going to do."

Almost half of the state's 421 school districts passed a referendum in April or November. Hutchison blames the state for not adequately funding school priorities, from building maintenance, to student mental-health services. The state superintendent announced last week the proposed 2025-27 budget would include $4 billion more in spending for public schools.

Despite 78% of the ballot measures passing, Hutchson said the districts where voters turned them down are in dire need of support to keep their doors open. Regardless of whether taxpayers have children in public schools, she says, the focus should be on providing every Wisconsin student with a quality education.

"I want their experience in public schools to be as awesome as my 25 and 26-year-old's were. I want them to get to be able to participate in sports, in theater, in drama and DECA, and learn about the history of our state and our country, and think about what our state and our country can be," she continued.

The study found factors like inflation outpacing the state allocated per-student revenue limits, the loss of pandemic aid and staff competition in a tight labor market are all factors that contributed to the record number of referendums.


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The presidential vote was close in Nevada and with the results in, local organizations leaning more progressive believe the re-election of Donald Trump could put much of the progress made in the Silver State in jeopardy.

Shelbie Swartz, executive director of Battle Born Progress, said Nevadans should take Trump's campaign promises seriously. She called on leaders in Carson City and in Congress to "stand up for their constituents," whom she argued a Trump administration could target, from immigrants to people who identify as transgender.

"If your values change based on polling, if your willingness to fight for the dignity of all Nevadans does not extend to our transgender siblings, then those are not values," Swartz contended. "They're talking points drafted in pencil."

Swartz stressed she has faith in the Nevada Legislature to pass bills to uphold and protect the rights of Nevadans but added the biggest challenge will be seeing what can make it across Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo's desk. Last year, Lombardo, who endorsed Donald Trump, vetoed a record 75 bills passed by the Legislature's Democratic majority.

Trump campaigned on the idea of mass deportations and has doubled down on the threat since his win.

Leo Murrieta, executive director of the group Make the Road Action Nevada, said it is time for leaders who are ready to move beyond what he calls "fear-based policies," to advocate instead for immigration reform, including clearer, earned pathways to citizenship.

"It is time for leaders to see our community as an integral part of this country's fabric, not just a political talking point," Murrieta argued. "We are standing united with many other groups ready to resist any of the policies and any of the other threats that we're certainly going to face."

A new report from the American Immigration Council found a one-time mass deportation operation would cost the United States at least $315 billion to remove more than 13 million people.

California good governance experts are warning the expansion of presidential power under a second Trump administration could cast aside expertise and the public good to further purely political aims.

Over the past week, President-elect Donald Trump has nominated multiple candidates known more for their personal support for him than for relevant expertise.

Bill Resh, associate professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, said Trump appears to be following the blueprint set by Project 2025.

"Project 2025 puts into place principles such as loyalty, first and foremost, to the President as a criterion for placement into these agencies, and often with the intention of undermining those missions."

Supporters of President-elect Trump say voters have given him a mandate to govern as he sees fit. So far, he has nominated people strongly aligned with the oil industry to run the U.S. Interior Department and be Energy Secretary. He has nominated a climate change skeptic to run the Environmental Protection Agency, a television host with no executive experience as Defense Secretary, an election denier for Attorney General and a vaccine skeptic to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Resh noted Trump has already suggested using recess appointments to avoid what could be bruising confirmation hearings for some of his nominees.

"His stars are aligned to consolidate executive power and bring what used to be either quasi- or fully independent agencies, that were not subject to political whims, to bring those agencies to heel toward his policy preferences," Resh contended.

This year, the U.S. Supreme Court found presidents cannot be prosecuted for most actions in office. And come January, both houses of Congress will be controlled by allies of President-elect Trump.