Well over 400,000 persons work in the casino properties of the United States. Over half of these are in Nevada and Atlantic City facilities where casinos are attached to very large hotel complexes. Even nonhotel casinos, however, have large numbers of employees. Casino resorts are labor-intensive enterprises. For instance, one blackjack table will require the labor of five or six dealers, one and one-half supervisors, and one-half of a pit boss (assuming a pit of six tables.) Line authority extends upward from a dealer, to a game supervisor who will watch two or three tables, to a pit boss, to a shift manager, to a casino manager, to a general manager. There are also many other important jobs on the casino floor. Slot machines require attendants and technicians. There are drink service personnel (where jurisdictions permit drinking on the floor) and change personnel who furnish coins to slot machine players, although their role has lessened with dollar bill accepters on most machines. There are also change booth personnel who sell both coinage and casino chips, and there are the casinos cage and casino security. There are accounting departments and marketing departments behind the scenes.
Traditionally, persons working the games received very little pre-job training. Now, however, many complete courses at private training schools, at community colleges, or within the casinos. As the labor situation has tightened, casinos try to make the entry process as easy as possible, given the strict demands for casino integrity. In New Jersey and some other jurisdictions, the gaming employees must all be licensed. In Nevada, however, full licensing is required only for key employees or those above the pit boss level. Dealers must obtain “sheriff cards” that ensure they do not have a disqualifying criminal record. In several jurisdictions, strict licensing requirements have disqualified many lower economic status applicants for jobs, making public policies of trying to employ the unemployable very difficult to realize.
Casino workers operate in an atmosphere of great pressure. First of all, while the learning curve may be of short duration for a job as a dealer, the job involves several skills that many people do not have. Of course, blackjack dealers have to be able to count to twenty-one. But it is not just counting: It is constant quick counting of hand after hand while keeping track of bets, shuffling cards, keeping an even disposition, and maintaining the integrity of the table; all of this while being watched constantly by a hidden camera that records every move. Moreover, keeping an even disposition is not always easy, as players who lose money can be quite rude. Even nice players can fill the atmosphere with cigarette smoke, and alcohol flows more freely than may be desirable. Breaks do not occur often enough, but when they do, it may be in an atmosphere where drug use is prevalent and cigarette smoking is almost universal. Meals are taken “on the run.”
Along with these difficulties, the dealers are subject to casino policies (in Nevada and several other jurisdictions) mandating that they can be fired at will. A new pit boss may come in at any time and decide he or she has to give a dealer’s job to someone as a favor. The result is, one dealer has to be fired. No cause need be given, especially if the dealer is a white male (that is, not a member of a protected class). The compensation situation also exacerbates the pressure-filled environment of dealing. Dealers in Nevada receive little more than a minimum wage with a good benefits package. Most of their compensation comes from tips that are distributed to the dealer staff each day. The tips can fluctuate greatly from day to day, as the business volumes of most casinos are not uniform throughout the year. The tip situation has also led to a high degree of surveillance of dealers by Internal Revenue Service officials, making life even more uncomfortable.
The fluctuations and uncertainty about tips make it difficult for most dealers to gain good credit ratings. They tend not to become homeowners, and they tend to have overall low job satisfaction scores on surveys. Two Las Vegas sociologists found in a survey that 86 percent of the dealers reported that they “never knew when they might be fired,” and 80 percent said they would rather be working someplace else. Nearly four in five saw themselves working in another job within five years, and three in five saw “no future” in dealing; 69 percent found it a boring job; 70 percent disliked the lifestyle of their job; and 68 percent felt they were less happy than workers in other jobs (Frey and Carns 1987, 38). Unfortunately, the money from tips in good casinos makes their overall compensation packages quite lucrative, and few find the initiative to give up their jobs for better jobs that might require, at least at first, a reduction of their income.
The tip system varies from casino to casino. Only a rare casino in Nevada will let dealers keep their individual tips. In almost all casinos tips are pooled. In some places, for instance the Mirage, the pool consists of every dealer of every game for the entire day. In other places, such as Caesars, the tip pool goes to dealers on particular pits of games for their particular shift on one day. The different methods of tip distribution can cause wide differences in compensation, as certain games and pits attract better (more affluent) players, as do certain shifts and days of play. An example of the differentials was offered when a billionaire gambler from Australia made two visits to Las Vegas. On each occasion, he made a $100,000 tip for the blackjack dealers – actually, he played $50,000 for the dealer. He won both times. At Caesars, each blackjack dealer for the shift was given $300 in tips as a result. When the exercise was repeated at the Mirage, all dealers of all games for the day received a cut, and the individual result was a $110 tip.
In many jurisdictions of the world, casino dealers are unionized. Many dealers with unions have gone on strike. This has happened in Winnipeg and Windsor, Canada; in Spa, Belgium; and in casinos in southern France; this is not the case in Las Vegas. The leading union, the Culinary Union, organized all the other nonmanagement workers in the casinos and the hotels, and they agreed that they would leave dealers alone. The Nevada casinos have firmly established the notion that they need direct control over workers in order to maintain tight security at the casinos. Dealers are subject to drug and lie detector tests, at least at the hiring stage.
Supervisory personnel in the casinos – pit bosses and casino managers—have general responsibilities for monitoring the flow of the games and the flow of money in and out of the games. They also are the key casino employees with the responsibility for ensuring that the top players receive complimentary services. They work with hosts to ensure that good players get free rooms, free transportation, free meals, show tickets, and other “services” that may be appropriate—that is, from a casino economics standpoint. The pit boss is responsible for ensuring that the high-roller player is actually making the wagers that he or she is obligated to make in order to qualify for the free services.
Change personnel for slot players are not as prevalent as they were in the past. Much of their job function has been automated. Where they do exist, they are usually the lowest of the low among regular casino employees. Shills, persons paid to sit at tables and essentially pretend they are playing, are the really lowest, but they are not regular employees. Change persons are still very much needed, as the majority of the casino wins (even on the Strip) are from machine gamblers, and without change persons they lose most of the human contact that a casino can give them. Change persons and other slot personnel are necessary as ambassadors to the group that is collectively the best-playing group in the casino.
The work situation in casinos varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In Las Vegas, with the onslaught of many new properties, good treatment of dealers and others is essential if the casino is to be successful. Labor is in such demand that firings without cause have become much more rare. Enlightened management is also learning a corollary to the golden rule of good customer service: “Treat your employees the way you would like your employees to treat the customer”.
|
|