Tens of thousands of Las Vegas hotel workers set a deadline Thursday for a sweeping strike, threatening major disruptions to the city’s economic backbone that could coincide with the Strip’s inaugural Formula 1 races later this month.

The Culinary Workers Union said about 35,000 members whose contracts expired earlier this year are ready and willing to walk off the job at 18 casinos if deals aren’t reached by Nov. 10 with casino giants MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment and Wynn Resorts.

That’s five days before the Las Vegas Grand Prix weekend, which is expected to bring thousands of people to the Strip, is set to kick off with an opening ceremony.

At a news conference, Ted Pappageorge, the union’s secretary-treasurer and chief contract negotiator, urged tourists and Formula 1 ticket-holders to support the workers if they go on strike by not coming to Las Vegas or crossing the picket lines.

“We will be communicating to ask customers that they should take their business elsewhere,” he said.

Formula 1 did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Pappageorge said the union and its members hope it doesn’t come to a strike but that “workers are prepared, united and ready to strike if necessary.”

Nevada’s largest labor union, with about 60,000 members statewide, hasn’t gone on strike in decades.

A walkout would be the latest in a series of high-profile labor unrest actions around the country — from walkouts in Hollywood to UPS’ contentious negotiations that threatened to disrupt the nation’s supply chain — and would follow hospitality workers walking off the job last month at Detroit’s three casinos, including MGM Grand Detroit.

Las Vegas police arrest members of the Culinary Workers Union, in Las Vegas, on Oct. 25, 2023. John Locher / AP

In Las Vegas, the 18 properties that could be impacted by a strike are Aria, Bellagio, Excalibur, Luxor, Mandalay Bay, MGM Grand, New York-New York, Park MGM, Caesars Palace, Flamingo, Harrah’s, Horseshoe, Paris Las Vegas, Planet Hollywood, The Cromwell, The Linq, and Wynn and Encore Resorts.

The union’s deadline comes after yet another unsuccessful round of negotiations with the three casino companies. A spokesperson for Wynn Resorts declined to comment. Caesars and MGM Resorts did not respond to emailed requests for comment.

Negotiations have been underway since April over topics such as pay and working conditions.

Members currently receive health insurance and earn about $26 hourly, including benefits, union spokesperson Bethany Khan said. She declined to say how much the union is seeking in pay raises because, she said, “we do not negotiate in public,” but the union has said it is asking for “the largest wage increases ever negotiated” in its history.

Hospitality workers — from bartenders and cocktail servers to kitchen employees and housekeepers — have also said they want better job security amid advancements in technology, as well as stronger security protections, including more safety buttons.

“We don’t feel safe on the casino floor,” veteran Bellagio cocktail waitress Leslie Lilla told The Associated Press. “We need enhanced security. We need emergency buttons in our service bars. We want to be protected, as well as for our guests.”

The union said it had been patient with the casino companies over seven months of negotiations that spurred large-scale rallies on the Strip, including one in October that brought rush-hour traffic to a halt and ended with the arrests of 58 hotel workers who sat in the street in what they described at the time as a show of force ahead of any potential strike.

“This is our time. This is the labor movement’s time,” Lilla said. “We know that we can’t be a society where it’s just upper class and lower class. There’s got to be a middle. Unions create that middle class.”

Matthew Perry, the beloved actor best known for his role as sarcastic, wise-cracking Chandler Bing on the sitcom “Friends,” died Saturday at age 54.

He left behind a legion of fans and a sizable estate.

A significant portion of the actor’s wealth came from his most iconic role. That income reportedly amounts to $20 million a year, from syndication and streaming revenue.

A spokesperson for Warner Bros., which owns the show’s distribution rights, declined to verify or comment on the residual payments. CNBC was unable to reach Perry’s representatives for comment.

What may happen to Perry’s ‘Friends’ residuals

When an actor passes away, residual payments are considered the actor’s personal property. Now, this residual cash flow stream is presumably owned by his estate.

There could be three possibilities for the inheritance of Perry’s “Friends” residuals based on laws in California, where he resided, said Charlie Douglas, a certified financial planner and president of HH Legacy Investments in Atlanta.

The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists has contracts in which its members can list beneficiaries for residual payments upon death. As one option, Perry could have named an individual or individuals here. (It’s a similar exercise to naming a beneficiary for common types of accounts like 401(k) or individual retirement accounts.)

As a second option, Perry may have named a trust — and not an individual — as the beneficiary of his residual payments, Douglas said. The residuals would flow to the trust and the trust would, in turn, have stipulations as to who received them.

Unlike wills, which are a matter of public record in probate, trusts are private — in which case the public may never know who inherits Perry’s “Friends” income.

However, there’s a third option: that Perry didn’t name any beneficiary. In this case, state law would determine his estate plan.

“It’s quite possible that, not having a spouse or children, he didn’t [write in] anything,” Douglas said.

All states have a framework that dictates how your cash and belongings ought to be distributed when you die. These are known as intestacy laws, and they vary from state to state.

In most states, this is the typical hierarchy for inheritance, in order of who stands to receive assets: first the spouse, then children, grandchildren, parents and, finally, siblings, Douglas said.

Perry never married or had children. He is survived by his parents (who divorced when Perry was less than a year old and have both since remarried) and five half-siblings.

In California, his parents will be the likely takers of Perry’s royalties from acting roles, as well as other parts of his estate including his 2022 memoir, according to Tasha Dickinson, trusts and estates partner at Day Pitney.

If this were the case, his parents could elect to make a “qualified disclaimer” giving up their rights to the residuals, in which case the money would pass to the half-siblings, Douglas said.

“It’s not unheard of at all that wealthy parents make disclaimers,” he said. For example, Perry’s stepfather is Keith Morrison, an award-winning broadcast journalist and longtime correspondent for NBC’s “Dateline.”

Otherwise, Perry’s assets will be divided up based on the probate court system.

“Probate is especially undesirable in California because it’s expensive, time-consuming and an invasion of privacy [since] all court matters are public record,” said David Oh, head of tax and estate planning at Arta Finance.

For celebrities like Perry, especially, “not having an estate plan creates confusion, attracts unwanted media attention and can cause family disputes,” he added.

Charity may have figured into Perry’s estate

Perry may have also opted to leave his estate outside his family.

He had close relationships personally and professionally and supported several philanthropic interests, “and it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of his wealth go towards them,” Oh said.

The actor, who publicly struggled with addiction for years, once opened a sober living facility at his Malibu mansion and was working to create a foundation for addiction issues.

On Nov. 3, the Matthew Perry Foundation was established in his name as a donor-advised fund. The charity is sponsored and maintained by National Philanthropic Trust.

“When I die, I know people will talk about ‘Friends,’ ‘Friends,’ ‘Friends,‘” Perry said during an interview in 2022. “And I’m glad of that, happy I’ve done some solid work as an actor … But when I die, as far as my so-called accomplishments go, it would be nice if ‘Friends’ were listed far behind the things I did to try to help other people. I know it won’t happen, but it would be nice.”

Charitably inclined people can also use their donations to avoid or reduce estate taxes. Charitable contributions aren’t subject to estate taxes, Douglas said.

For 2023, individuals can leave up to $12.92 million to heirs without triggering a federal estate-tax bill. Beyond that, the federal estate tax rate is 40%, and although California has no estate tax or inheritance tax, that can still mean a big bill for someone like Perry, according to Oh of Arta Finance. 

Sometimes, charitably minded people will donate any assets above the estate-tax threshold to charity and leave the remainder to heirs, thereby avoiding estate taxes altogether, Douglas said.

Often, such high-net worth taxpayers work with advisors on these types of strategies.

“Estate planning is not fun — not many people enjoy confronting their mortality — but the more money and assets, whether they be real or intellectual property or copyrights or royalties one has, the more important it is to have all the proverbial ducks in row,” said David Johnston, a certified financial planner and managing partner of Amwell Ridge Wealth Management.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC’s “Dateline” and CNBC.

When Tyson Foods announced in August that it was closing its 1,500-worker chicken plant in Noel, Missouri, residents knew the rural town would be hit hard. Some started leaving soon after the company — which employed more than a quarter of the surrounding county — broke the news.

The site shut down late last month, one of three October closures in a broader shake-up that the meat giant said reflected its “commitment to bold action and operational excellence.”

But Jimi Lasiter stayed put.

After 11 years at the plant, she was holding out for her $1,000 severance check and assessing the exodus’ impact on her community. By the end of September, she said around half a dozen colleagues had already left their tight-knit team of about 20; those who remained were packing office supplies and furniture rather than cuts of meat. She didn’t want to create more work for them by leaving early, and she wasn’t in a rush.

“If I’m gonna go someplace else, especially if I’m gonna get anything that pays more than $10 or $12 an hour, I’m gonna have to drive 45 minutes,” Lasiter said at the time.

By Friday, though, she said she still hadn’t received her severance, complicating her plans to file for unemployment benefits and take some time to weigh her options. Tyson didn’t immediately comment on its compensation of former Noel employees.

Like Lasiter, many workers are weighing their moves in a slowing national labor market. While hiring growth remains strong, people in rural areas without ample employment opportunities nearby are facing challenges that policymakers from the municipal to the federal levels say they’re pushing to address.

Data released Friday showed the economy added 150,000 jobs in October, down from 297,000 in September. Unemployment, while still at historic lows, ticked up to 3.9%. Last week President Joe Biden embarked on a tour of rural communities to highlight more than $5 billion in agricultural and small-town infrastructure investments aimed at spurring growth in places like Noel.

Tyson and Noel officials have hosted job fairs for laid-off workers, and the company said more than 300 employees are relocating from closing facilities to its other sites.

Even as it’s on pace to shut six plants this year and the next, triggering more than 4,600 job cuts, Tyson is developing two new ones in Danville, Virginia, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, set to employ 850 people altogether.

“My first thought was: How can I stay with the company?” said Corina Chinchilla, 32, who worked for 13 years at the Noel plant, ultimately becoming a production supervisor for packaging chicken breasts and tenders.

She “applied right away” for a lateral move to Tyson’s plant in Monett, Missouri, about 60 miles northeast of Noel but a similar 35-minute drive from her home in Neosho. All three towns, situated in the western Ozark Mountains, belong to a region where average annual income is $39,600 and 20% of jobs are in manufacturing.

“I’ve talked to people that didn’t relocate, and they’re like, ‘Let me know if something comes up there,’” Chinchilla said.

Tyson confirmed that David Handy, a pallet jack operator at the Noel plant who spoke with NBC News in August about the closure, was among the 16% of the facility’s workforce who took internal transfers. Handy didn’t respond to recent requests for comment.

Tyson closed its facility in North Little Rock, Ark., last month.Danny Johnston / AP file

Other Tyson workers, like Ryan Coulter, 27, declined to move.

After working at the North Little Rock, Arkansas, plant that closed in early October, in roles that included assessing meat inventories, Coulter ruled out commuting to the nearest active Tyson complex.

While the average price of a gallon of gas in Arkansas, at $3.03, is about 22 cents cheaper than it was a year ago, he’d be driving much farther.

“I’d end up spending half my check getting there,” he said. “That’s stressful. I ain’t gonna set myself up for failure.”

Instead, Coulter said, he took a job at a nearby Value Foods grocery store. He declined to say how the pay compares.

While big employers like Amazon and Costco have expanded in the Little Rock metro area, attracting young professionals and a range of new jobs, Noel’s economic future looks more uncertain.

Mayor Terry Lance said he was working with the Harry S. Truman Coordinating Council, an economic development group in southwest Missouri, to find ways to move Noel beyond its longtime identity as a largely single-employer town.

In the weeks after the plant closure was announced, he said he’d talked with a pontoon boat manufacturer about taking it over, but that that company would employ no more than 350 workers at full capacity. Since then, Lance said a Texas firm that converts wastewater sludge to feedstock had signed a letter of intent to buy the complex, but he was “not convinced they can do that without a lot of odors” and wanted to avoid a “nightmare.”

Lance said other ideas included opening an “industrial training facility” at the plant and pivoting Noel toward tourism, drawing on local attractions like the Elk River — Noel calls itself the “canoeing capital of the Ozarks” — and the Bluff Dwellers Cave just outside town.

He said he expects “two years of really, really lean times” but was confident the community would persevere. “I want to urge all of our business owners to hold on, because I really do think we’ll come back on the other side of it better,” he said.

Some of the town’s character that Lance sees as an asset may already be waning.

“Everyone has their own unique art, craft, food and music, and that’s what tourists like,” he said of the robust immigrant communities drawn to Noel during its decades as a poultry hub. But as the Missouri Independent reported last week, many residents from Somalia and elsewhere who are in the United States under refugee programs have been quick to head out in search of new jobs, concerned about their employment prospects.

State and federal officials, wary of economic fallout in the region, have pressed Tyson to sell some of the sites it’s vacating.

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey have both warned publicly that failing to seek new operators for the Noel plant and the one in Dexter that closed last month could violate antitrust laws. In September, Hawley said Tyson CEO Donnie King had reassured him that the company was willing to sell “to any interested party — including a competitor.”

Tyson, which declined to comment on the future of its shuttered plants, has said it was “supporting impacted team members and growers” and was “open to receiving all offers.”

The U.S. economy saw job creation decelerate in October, confirming persistent expectations for a slowdown and possibly taking some heat off the Federal Reserve in its fight against inflation.

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 150,000 for the month, the Labor Department reported Friday, against the Dow Jones consensus forecast for an increase of 170,000.

The unemployment rate rose to 3.9%, against expectations that it would hold steady at 3.8%. Employment as measured in the household survey, which is used to compute the unemployment rate, showed a decline of 348,000 workers, while the rolls of the unemployed rose by 146,000.

A more encompassing jobless rate that includes discouraged workers and those holding part-time positions for economic reasons rose to 7.2%, an increase of 0.2 percentage point.

Average hourly earnings, a key measure for inflation, increased 0.2% for the month, less than the 0.3% forecast, while the 4.1% year over year again was 0.1 percentage point above expectations.

Markets reacted positively to the report, with futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average adding 100 points.

Former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried faces the prospect of a long prison sentence, but that’s not the end of the FTX legal saga.

The FTX co-founder and ex-CEO was convicted of all seven fraud and money laundering charges against him on Thursday. He faces as much as 110 years in prison if Judge Lewis Kaplan gives him maximum sentences and consecutive terms.

Bankman-Fried is scheduled to learn his sentence on March 28, 2024. His lawyers have suggested they will appeal the guilty verdicts against him at that time.

He still faces another trial over other allegations including that he bribed Chinese officials. That trial is also scheduled to start in March.

What about Bankman-Fried’s former colleagues?

He’s not the only one waiting to learn his fate. Former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and former engineering chief Nishad Singh all pleaded guilty to a series of criminal charges and cooperated with the government’s prosecution of Bankman-Fried. The three testified against him in the hope they would receive lighter sentences.

They’re likely to be sentenced after Bankman-Fried is.

Chris LaVigne, the global co-chair of the digital asset group at international law firm Withers Worldwide, said it’s likely that all three will go to prison, as well.

‘Given what they’ve admitted to, it isn’t likely that they are going to end up with a non-incarceratory sentence,’ LaVigne, who is not involved in the case, told NBC News. Still, he said, their cooperation means the government will recommend that they receive a shorter sentence than what they would have received if they had been convicted after a trial.

In determining the sentences that Wang, Ellison and Singh receive, Kaplan will consider factors including whether they intended to commit crimes, how helpful the government found their cooperation, whether they seem remorseful, and their potential for rehabilitation.

What about FTX’s users?

Bankman-Fried was found responsible for taking some $8 billion from FTX’s users without their consent and giving it to Alameda Research. The money was given to Alameda’s lenders and was also used to pay for FTX corporate sponsorships, its Super Bowl ad and for enormous loans to corporate insiders, among other things.

LaVigne, who is also the head of Withers’ U.S. litigation team, said there are essentially two paths to returning funds to people who lost money to FTX, and to FTX’s and Alameda’s creditors.

The first involves the U.S. government. As part of their guilty pleas, Wang, Ellison and Singh all agreed to forfeit proceeds from their time at FTX and Alameda. For example, Singh agreed to forfeit a multimillion-dollar home he’d bought in Washington state and an investment in the AI company Anthropic PBC that was then worth $40 million.

LaVigne said the government will probably set up a fund for FTX victims, get money the insiders received from FTX, auction off any ill-gotten assets, and return the proceeds to people who apply successfully to the victims fund.

‘If there’s billions in investments from a criminal and proceeds or money elsewhere, the government is going to get it,’ he said.

Meanwhile, U.S. Trustee Andrew Vara will try to recoup money for victims through the bankruptcy process.

‘That trustee and that estate is building a huge war chest to try to compensate creditors, which include customers of FTX,’ LaVigne said.

Both of those processes can take a very long time to play out. The failure of FTX has often been compared to the infamous Ponzi scheme run by Bernie Madoff, which was exposed in December 2008. Trustee Irving Picard returned some $13 billion to victims over the course of a decade, while the U.S. government said it returned $4 billion to the Madoff Victim Fund. It announced the most recent payment to that fund in September 2022.

‘These things go on for a long time and they find money wherever they can,’ LaVigne said.

The government can also pursue any company or person it believes was complicit in the scheme. In the Madoff case, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay more than $2 billion in fines and penalties to settle allegations that it turned a blind eye to Madoff’s actions for more than a decade.