Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming November 2014 28 so the city has fallen into a trap that is dumbing down the population and could have other long-reaching negatives consequences. It would have been better to take the short-term pain and open dealer jobs to workers around the region and allow wages to fall to levels sufficient to draw low-skilled workers with the requisite skills from China, who arguably would do their jobs with more enthusiasm and aplomb than many of the locals are demonstrating. The locals should instead have been protected by reserving more senior positions for them, with the government providing comprehensive training and development programs. There would certainly be displacement, but in the long term you’d boost the value of the local workforce. Yet, even as a short-term fix, the ban on non-locals working as dealers has failed. It did push up the wages of this low-skilled occupation, and Macau’s median monthly income has risen in step, but that median income remains woefully low by developed world standards, and especially low compared with the wealthiest nations. It’s also failed to keep up with soaring house prices. Obviously, a sudden policy reversal to allow non-locals to work as dealers would be seriously destabilizing. Rather, it needs to be done discretely over a long time frame (say a decade), and in conjunction with the gradual creation of new high-value industries, within which jobs are preferentially awarded to locals, while migrant workers are quietly brought in to fill the dealer spots that will consequently open up. As more time passes, Macau’s dealer wages could eventually be determined by the wider free market, consisting of the massive pool of unskilled workers living in poor countries around the region (notably China and the Philippines), which could potentially bring down dealer wages to one-quarter of current levels. Then locals would naturally migrate to the high-paid non-dealer jobs, and casinos would have no problem obtaining enough dealers to man their tables. It’s a long-term plan, but the groundwork needs to be laid now. EVOLVING MACAU The knee-jerk political impulse to protect Macau citizens led to dealer jobs becoming the sole preserve of locals, and so the city has fallen into a trap that is dumbing down the population and could have other long-reaching negatives consequences.