President Biden met on Monday with members of Nevada’s powerful culinary workers union, after the union averted a planned strike by reaching contract agreements with Las Vegas properties over the weekend.
Mr. Biden visited the Vdara Hotel, one of the properties where the union agreed to a contract for its members, and greeted workers in an employee cafeteria — shaking hands, taking photos and at one point appearing to FaceTime with someone on a worker’s phone.
“Wall Street did not build America. The middle class built America. Unions built the middle class. There would be no middle class without the unions,” he told the crowd. “So I came to say thank you. Not just to say thank you for the support that you’ve given me last time out, but to thank you for having the faith in the union.”
Mr. Biden, who is expected to win the Democratic primary election in Nevada on Tuesday with ease, has often described himself as “the most pro-union president in American history.”
In June, when he was endorsed by an array of unions at a Philadelphia gathering, he came on the stage with his wife, Jill Biden, who was wearing a T-shirt from her teacher’s union. Then in September, he became the first sitting president to visit an active picket line when he joined striking autoworkers in Michigan. In fund-raising appeals, Mr. Biden’s campaign has taken to calling his likely Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, a “scab” — a union epithet for someone who crosses a picket line.
The president’s tight and public embrace of union workers comes as the country’s labor movement is growing younger, more diverse and more progressive.
Shawn Fain, the United Auto Workers president who endorsed Mr. Biden last month, is viewed as a liberal from the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. The culinary union in Las Vegas is dominated by Hispanic women. The teachers and hospital workers who populate other unions backing Mr. Biden are more likely to be people of color and women than the police, firefighters and construction workers who populated the unions that were long core to Mr. Biden’s political identity.
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.
