The Official Bulletin: 2016 Q4 / NO. 654

an estimate $8-10 million in added revenue per year to Local
720 members.
Business Representative John T. (JT) Gorey, whose
union history stretches back four generations with Local
One [Stagehands] in New York City, explains that Local 720
“doesn’t distinguish between tradeshow and AV much because
the vast majority of AV work happens during a convention.
We have some hotels with direct agreements,” Gorey
says, “and there’s full-time AV crews working there with a
weekly guarantee. But most of the time we’re going into the
hotels in large groups with exhibition and AV side-by-side.
The tradeshow side is rigging, carpentry and electric and the
AV is the projection, IT, sound, etc. But they’re all still working
on the same show.”
In fact, Las Vegas, the largest tradeshow/AV market by dollar
volume and available square footage of any city in the nation
(more than 10 million square feet of convention space), continues
to grow at a booming rate. The Riviera Hotel was recently
demolished to allow for further expansion of the adjacent Las
Vegas Convention Center, Mandalay Bay turned their parking
lot into an exhibition space, and Aria announced late last year
a massive new expansion of its convention center, which will
cover an additional 200,000 square feet and overtake the lavish
theater that has been home to Zarkana since that show opened
in November 2012. Ballrooms and meeting spaces in hotels adjacent
to the Las Vegas Convention Center, like the Westgate and
Renaissance, are now routinely dominated by association tradeshow
events. “We actually ran out of people this past August,”
Gorey recounts. “We always expect to be overextended when
shows like CES and NAB [January and April respectively] come
into town. But to be tapped out in the middle of August – that’s
a first in my twelve years with this Local. It’s obviously a very
nice problem to have.”
Even with 3,000 people in Local 720’s dispatch system,
spread over five different crafts, tradeshow/AV work calls still
outpace other sectors (theater, wardrobe, concert, film and TV)
by nearly two-thirds. Those are strong numbers in a right-towork
state with a short history of broad-based labor agreements
and Gorey says a big reason is Local 720’s emphasis on staying
current with new technology.
“If there are members at a venue who don’t know how to
run a grandMA lighting console, for example,” he observes,
“our training manager makes arrangements to have the specific
equipment that’s needed, and we get those crewmembers
to work hands-on since the funds are paid into the Trust by
their employer. A few months back we had an LED bezel wall
Local 720 Small Meeting
Room Projection Class.
Local 720 Small Meeting
Room Projection Class.
FOURTH QUARTER 2016 19