Well, Wynn had their union vote. Not surprisingly, the union passed overwhelmingly (444-149). I’m interested to see what happens. There’s no guarantee that the union can get all the tokes paid back to the dealers, and if they do actually get tokes back to 100% for the dealers, what concessions the dealers will have to make. Now that Trump Marina, Ceasars (both Atlantic City) and now Wynn have unions (so does the Argosy for that matter, but I haven’t heard about their influence) as well as the casinos in Detroit, will we start seeing a push in smaller markets such as ours to go union?
In all honesty, I don’t think there’s a damned thing a union could do for us. Period. I would just think it’s just another layer of apathy in a long line of it at work.
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May 13th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
You can do more for the union ($$$) than the union can do for you probably.
Of course the unions are going to start expanding hard into fields they haven’t been in before.. they want the money and it’s drying up in the industries that have typically been heavily unionized in the past.
I really believe that the drive for unionization purely stems from highest echeleons of the organization desire to have your money in their pocket much more than any “power to the working man” idealization.
Wynn could fire all the unionized dealers at his casinos and probably wouldn’t give a rats ass about any consequences.. and he would have thousands of applicants lined up to take their spots immediately.. don’t you think? I don’t know if Nevada is an “at will” employment state.. or if he would fire them.. but if they went on strike anyway, I don’t think it would bother him for more than a couple days tops. His doors aren’t gonna close if he loses two days income either.
May 13th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
What do you mean get tokes back 100% for dealers?
-K
May 14th, 2007 at 11:51 am
The tokes at Wynn are split between the “Team Leads” (floors) and dealers. The floors get a cut (20% if I remember right) or the toke pool. What I mean by getting dealers back to 100% is to get the floors out of the toke pool. Wynn did this mainly to give the floors a pay raise without dipping into his own pockets to do it. Wynn had a bunch of labor attorneys and the what not look over his plan and it was pretty much fool proof (it was challenged in the courts and labor commission and lost).
Scott, if Wynn would’ve fired all the dealers right around the time of the vote, that would’ve been considered tampering with an union election, and that a big no-no. Now, if Wynn fires all the dealers now, the union could immediately come in and file grievances and muddle things up pretty well. And a strike is the last thing Wynn wants to deal with right now. He’s gotten a lot of bad press lately in the states (I’m not sure how his Macau property is doing, but from what I understand, the construction was WAY overbudget) and this would really put him in a bad way. Having a bunch of pissed off union types in front of the casino isn’t going to help either. And, whatever Wynn had done in Vegas, other companies have followed and trends have been set. With this union vote passing, you’re going to see a lot of the companies take notice, and they are NOT gonna be happy.
I’ve stated before I’m anti-union. We all know it’s a business that pays it’s management well. The times for a union has passed. Yes, they’ve done some good things, in the early 1900s. But, what have they done lately?