Battle lines drawn over tip-sharing plan

By Liz Benston
Las Vegas Sun
May 18, 2007

The Assembly, feeling heat from Wynn Las Vegas dealers, passed a bill that would effectively derail Steve Wynn's policy that rank-and-file dealers share their tips with their immediate supervisors.

But now that the Nevada Resort Association, previously silent on the bill, has come out quietly in opposition to it, Assembly Bill 248 is languishing in the Senate with little hope of surviving the industry's powerful lobby.

The carefully worded bill would prevent casinos from sharing dealer tips with supervisors who don't normally receive tips directly from gamblers. That would include the supervisors who work alongside dealers at Wynn.

Even though they've been reclassified as nonmanagement "service team leaders" with hourly wages and new job functions, these folks wouldn't usually receive tips from patrons.

Other casinos are trying to distance themselves from Wynn's controversial policy, not wanting to upset an army of sympathetic tipped workers contemplating a similar fate. So, behind the scenes, the casino association is carefully walking the fence. Philosophically, it wants management to retain control over tip pools, so it's in the position of siding with Wynn in Carson City - even though most casino bosses in town don't want to rile the rank-and-file by adopting Wynn's policy.

Little wonder, then, that dealers are wary of MGM Mirage Chief Executive Terry Lanni after he said publicly that tips earned by his dealers "belong to them" and that the company wouldn't implement tip-sharing programs "at any of our resorts," including the upcoming CityCenter.