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Wednesday, June 21, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal "Dealers group has plans to
reorganize nationally"
By Jan Hogan
lasvegas.com Gaming Wire
The Nevada Casino Dealers Association will be reorganized July 1 into a new
nationwide union to better represent its members, Tony Badillo, president of the Nevada
Casino Dealers Association, said.
The association now has about 6,000 members and, except for a handful from
Atlantic City and the Midwest, the majority work in Nevada. There are approximately 70,000
casino dealers in Nevada.
Badillo's new group will be called the National Federation of Gaming Employees.
Badillo said he anticipates a thousand new members will join within the first year. Within
five years, he expects 100,000 dealers to have joined the the federation, each paying dues
of approximately $30 a month
"Gaming has spread all over the country," he said. "We get calls from
lots of dealers who want to be in a union."
Badillo said the larger union will help bring workers job security. He
said the biggest areas of concern for dealers are working conditions -- no-smoking tables,
a standard work schedule of 40 minutes on/20 minutes off and more comfortable noise levels
in casinos. The union also wants to address how casinos use extraboard, or on-call,
dealers, he said. "Some hotels abuse the power they have," Badillo said, who was
a blackjack dealer for 42 years. "They're looking for cheap labor. They
use extra-board employees as a full-time employees so they don't have to pay medical benefits."
Vince Eade, professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas International
Gaming Institute, said he had not heard of the new union and couldn't
comment in detail. "I will say that conditions for dealers are much improved
over what they were years ago," Eade said. "If I were a
dealer, I'd want to know what the union will improve as far as wages, hours
and working conditions before I signed."
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