Skin in the Game
EIGHTY-NINE days before the November election, Ashenafi Hagezom is up before dawn. From his two-bedroom house in northwest Las Vegas, which he shares with roommates, it can take up to an hour to reach the Bellagio, the faux-Italian luxury hotel and casino in the heart of the Strip. He parks in the employee garage out back and passes through the air-conditioned doors just after 7 a.m., before the graveyard shift begins to trickle out and gives way to the army of guest-room attendants, prep cooks, and porters who keep the casino humming for another day.
Dressed in business casual, with a casino-issued ID badge on his button-down shirt, Hagezom—“Ash” to his friends—could pass for any one of the hundreds of employees coming and going through the halls, were it not for the stack of papers he carries and the union pin that explains why he’s there. Hagezom is a political “loa”—an organizer on a leave of absence from his day job—with the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, which represents nearly 60,000 workers, almost all of whom are clustered in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. And he and his colleagues have no small task: to make sure that the voting bloc local political analyst Jon Ralston calls “the most potent force in Nevada politics” shows up en masse in November.
Hagezom, the 27-year-old son of Ethiopian immigrants, carries a list half an inch thick containingutes. Sometimes it’s half an hour. He walks members through their new contracts, helps them fill out voter registration forms, and listens to whatever’s on their minds. During this particular week, organizers are signing up workers for the union’s annual citizenship fair, a weekend workshop where lawyers help green-card holders navigate the maze of government paperwork—a push that’s taken on new urgency in the Trump era. And with every member on his list, he makes sure to talk about the November election. If a worker asks about Dean Heller, the state’s Republican senator, Hagezom brings up Heller’s initial silence on family separations—a story that’s been rippling through the union’s predominantly Hispanic workforce. He isn’t making a push for specific candidates yet; the purpose is to plant a seed that will germinate by the fall, when hundreds more members will take leave from their jobs to help out.
