Caesars Palace and the Cost-of-Living Strike

Last month, five unions shut down the Long Island Rail Road — the country’s largest commuter line — over pay. More than 300,000 riders were stranded, at an estimated $61 million a day to the region.

The argument: workers couldn’t keep up with the rising cost of living.

Then the filings came out. Those same five unions reported more than $3.2 million in 2025 spending on hotels, resorts, restaurants, and event venues — pulled straight from the LM-2 forms they file with the Department of Labor.

A few of the line items: roughly $500,000 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas (BLET and IAM), $856,403 at Caesar’s in Reno (TCU), $20,000-plus at Peter Luger, and six figures at beachfront resorts in Florida and on Mackinac Island.

Unions use hotels and venues for trainings, conferences, and travel, and they characterize these as ordinary event costs, not perks.

But the optics are the optics. It’s a hard sell to tell 300,000 stranded commuters the trains stopped over a cost-of-living crisis while the books show casino ballrooms and steakhouse tabs.

This is also why I keep coming back to what I call “Finance Unionism” — and why the DOL’s new LM-2 transparency rule matters. These numbers came straight off those disclosures.

The question members should ask isn’t whether the spending was technically allowed. It’s whether it reflects the priorities they pay dues for.