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"Help Wanted"
Is the
long-awaited dealer shortage finally upon us? Read on...
Sunday, July 16, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
HELP WANTED
By Dave Berns
Las Vegas Review-Journal
The phone calls come in several times a day to Joel Lauer's school
for casino dealers.
Downtown joints need craps dealers, blackjack dealers, newly
trained bodies to run the table games at the Strip's
less-fortunate stepsister.
Just weeks after walking through the doors of PCI Dealer's School,
many have minimum-wage jobs.
"If it's a really bad situation they say, `Send someone right
now,' " Lauer said of desperate casino bosses.
Bad situation?
Casino executives say record low unemployment levels throughout
the country have made it more difficult to find qualified
front-line workers and managers.
Combine that with the Las Vegas megaresort construction boom of
the '90s and the national spread of casino gambling and there's a
constant demand for dealers, housekeepers, computer experts and
managers at gaming properties throughout the country.
"It's really one of the biggest challenges that the industry
faces, and I don't even limit it to gaming. It's all aspects of
hospitality," said Bear, Stearns & Co. gaming analyst
Jason Ader.
Downtown's El Cortez is known as a break-in house, the sort of
place where dealers go to complete what serves as an
apprenticeship before moving on to the big-tip gambling halls of
the Strip.
While hourly wages are generally similar from downtown to the
Strip, about $5.15, it's the tips that lure hungry rookies to Las
Vegas Boulevard. Rather than earning $35 a day at Fremont Street
casinos, Strip dealers earn $100 to $200 nightly in tokes, with
free-tipping gamblers, known in the pits as "Georges,"
boosting those numbers geometrically for some shifts.
Billy Cheung's been working at the El Cortez for 27 years, and as
a pit boss he's regularly on the phone with local dealer schools
in search of help.
In the old days, new dealers spent 18 to 24 months learning their
trade at Jackie Gaughan's hotel, Cheung recalled, but now they're
gone within four months. The Strip needs them.
Then there's the allure of casinos in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri
and 21 other states that steal many Las Vegas workers.
The result: casino floors that are dotted with relatively
underskilled dealers and managers who require intensive on-the-job
training to prevent customer frustration and con-man hustles.
"The quality is not as high as before," Cheung said.
In many ways this is a tale of numbers.
There were 193,000 full-time positions in Clark County's hotel and
gaming industry in 1999, according to Nevada's Department of
Employment, Training and Rehabilitation. That was up 16 percent
from the 166,700 full-time positions recorded in 1997 before the
openings of Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, The Venetian and Paris.
Meantime, the county's unemployment rate fell from 4 percent in
1997 to 3.8 percent in April. But its surging population grew to
1.32 million people in 1999, up from 1.17 million two years
earlier.
So what does it all mean? Depends on who's talking.
Top bosses at the newest megaresorts said they have little trouble
finding workers. Richard Goeglein, chairman of the company that
will operate the soon-to-open Aladdin, calls it "the tsunami
effect."
"Every time a brand new really big property opens, especially
if it's positioned in one of the resort areas ... there's all
sorts of people that want to come to the new place to try
something different," Goeglein said.
"The anomaly of Las Vegas," adds Bellagio Vice President
of Human Resources Arte Nathan, "is the influx of new
residents, and we are a unique community because of it. They are
people from all walks of life, from all areas of the country, and
percentages have not changed in terms of the number of friendly,
open people who are employable."
But executives of less-trendy operations such as the El Cortez
experience the brunt of the problem, with the megaresorts
regularly raiding their best workers.
"For the lesser properties, the older properties, the
tertiary properties, there's a lot of that," said one
longtime casino boss who requested anonymity.
Job fairs, employment centers, training programs that target
welfare parents and the underemployed have all become standard
tools for the aggressive personnel director, and so too has the
Internet, with an increasing number of gaming companies turning to
the World Wide Web to recruit workers.
Economic reality dictates that most Web surfers are somewhat
better off financially. After all, they could afford the
$1,000-plus price tag for a computer. So the Internet has not been
an effective tool for recruiting housekeepers and maintenance
workers.
Nevertheless, Beth Deighan said her casinocareers.com Web site has
950 visitors daily who are seeking jobs as cage managers, casino
cashiers, cooks and finance directors. The hundreds of postings
are for jobs at tribal casinos in Michigan, hotel-casinos in
Louisiana and an off-Strip property in Las Vegas.
"We tended to promote from within as much as we could, and
now we find ourselves in a position where it's absolutely
necessary to train ... and bring in candidates from the
outside," Deighan said of the casino industry.
Yet, gaming executives said it's tough to persuade job candidates
to move cross-country to fill low-paying hourly wage jobs,
especially when employers are not paying moving expenses.
It's also difficult for the casino industry to recruit computer
specialists when they are competing with dot-com'ers and the
mystique of instant wealth.
"The HR director's nightmare is in the more technical
jobs," said Bellagio's Nathan. "Most of the people
moving are generalists who are trainable for 95 percent of the
jobs we have available."
That shortage of technical workers can be found among slot
technicians, computer technicians, convention and audio-visual
technicians, electricians and maintenance engineers. It's also
found in the kitchens of Las Vegas, as the spread of high-end
restaurants has created a demand for chefs, cooks and any of
several other food-service jobs.
"That's where you have to get creative," Nathan said,
"and work closely with apprenticeships and community college
programs."
On a recent weekday, about 30 students played or dealt at table
games packed into a small storefront that serves as Lauer's dealer
school along South Valley View Boulevard.
There was an acrobat who formerly performed at the MGM Grand theme
park, a longtime casino worker who was between jobs and seeking to
learn to deal a new game, and a young Army veteran who hopes to
make the big tips of a Strip casino.
As he sat by a blackjack table, 56-year-old Thomas Moran spoke of
the events that brought him to Lauer's school.
An aerospace engineer by training, Moran said he helped design the
B-1 bomber and C-17 cargo plane, saved a lot of money from a
series of well-paid jobs, but suffered through several layoffs in
the late 1980s and early 1990s before moving from Southern
California to become a commercial real estate broker in Las Vegas.
He eventually tired of the real estate business and enrolled in
the school.
"I know there won't be a problem getting a job," he
said.
As he spoke of his prospects, Moran pointed to a handbill
advertising casino jobs at the Barona tribal casino, just east of
San Diego. They pay $10 an hour, nearly twice the average for
local dealers.
The Barona is set to add table games and 1,000 slot machines to
its lucrative property after Californians voted in March to
approve Las Vegas-style gambling at the state's tribal casinos, a
move that could create 50 to 100 Golden State casinos and
additional competitive pressures for Las Vegas executives
attempting to recruit and retain workers.
"It's a little tough to speculate on the impact of
that," said Barona Assistant General Manager Lee Skelley, who
previously was a longtime Hilton Hotels gaming executive.
"California has a lot to offer with that ocean."
Moran is ready to return to Southern California, where his wife
works several days a week in the health care industry. Taxes and
housing are more expensive in the San Diego area, Moran noted, but
he was unfazed by the prospects.
"The money really doesn't make a difference," he said.
"What makes a difference is the type of casino it is.
"Besides, I don't want to go back to California without
something to do.
Sunday, July 16, 2000 Page 23A
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