Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | July 2009 42 as historic. The UAW’s Atlantic City Dealers Union has launched a multimillion- dollar multimedia advertising campaign targeting Bally’s and Caesars Atlantic City, claiming the casinos have not been bargaining in good faith for the past two years. The union says the effort is to inform the public that dealers have had their hours slashed, retirement benefits cut and seniority stripped while management stalls progress at the bargaining table or simply refuses to negotiate. The union is now teaming with the Service Employees International Union, the AFL-CIO and the Transport Workers Union in three other states (Nevada, Indiana and Connecticut) to ratchet up pressure for agreements. The new multi-headed entity is known as the Gaming Workers Council. Joe Ashton, a UAW regional director for New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania and New York, issued a statement that said: “I’ve lived in this area all my life, and I’ve seen the gaming industry grow up and become an important part of our community. A lot of jobs have been created, and many of them are good union jobs with good contracts negotiated with management by casino workers. There’s no reason that dealers and slot technicians should be left out.” Financial analysts who cover the industry say that the growth and power of unions is part of a bigger picture that is still taking shape, even as the economic landscape alters for workers and owners alike. In the meantime, they say, there is no clear means of quantifying, financially, what that power and growth might mean to profitability or share prices. Part of that has to do with how capital-intensive and technology- driven casinos and gaming companies have become. Table games— with or without newly unionized dealers—are becoming increasingly marginalized. And if labor does succeed in a given jurisdiction it could accelerate that marginalization. ‘Big bargaining issues’ “With the [Employee Free Choice Act] pending, unions are just salivating at the prospect of this fairly large group of employees to unionize.” “There are really some interesting microeconomic dynamics at play here,” Eadington noted. In particular, geography plays a bigger role than one might think in this day and age when American culture is said to be so homogenized. Perceptions about gambling vary from state to state. So, too, is organized labor’s chances of making an impact, in good times and in bad. “It makes sense to me because clearly when manufacturing unions started to decline, with those many jobs moving overseas, the logical move would be to go to other parts of the economy that were not affected by that kind of displacement,” said Sophia Koropeckyj, managing director for Moody’s Economy.com, in West Chester, Pa. In “right-to-work” states with established gaming, such as Mississippi, unions pose no immediate threat to owners. Not so in Atlantic City, where the employees and the vast majority of the customer base are from the historically union-friendly Northeast. Atlantic City of course is also a large market unto itself, so organizers can dig in for the long haul. “And we’re in an environment with [the Obama] administration that is much more sympathetic to [union] interests as well,” said Koropeckyj. “So even though there have been setbacks to the card- check legislation, it does make sense.” Of course, it would indeed make things more difficult for casinos, she pointed out.“What can happen then is a closing down, like when Wal-Mart butchers unionized, and they closed down the butcher department and started selling prepackaged meats. Casinos would The New Frontier witnessed the longest strike in US hotel history Special Feature