\nAn upcoming book by a pair of Richard Stockton College professors gives readers the deepest look yet at what it\u2019s like to work in the casino industry, the authors say.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cJust One More Hand: Life in the Casino Economy,\u201d set for a February release by Rowman and Littlefield, may be the most thorough qualitative analysis ever done of a casino workforce, co-authors Ellen Mutari and Deborah Figart said after a reading at Stockton on Thursday.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cThere have been a lot of studies about the industry, and gambling and addiction. There has been practically nothing about casino employment and people on the job,\u201d said Figart, a professor of education and economics.<\/p>\n
\tShe said the book draws from interviews of 35 employees of the Atlantic City casino-hotel industry and probes the question: Are these good jobs? The answer, the professors say, is: Not as good as they once were.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cWe emphasized the frontline jobs. The ones that have interaction with customers,\u201d said Mutari, an economics professor. \u201cMostly, it was dealers, floor people, people who worked with the slot machines, security, cocktails servers and hotel guest room attendants.\u201d
\n\tThe takeaway, she said, is that in Atlantic City, \u201cwhat once was a good job, has become a bad job.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tFigart said, \u201cLong before the great recession of 2008, the jobs were evolving as more and more companies got into the gaming market.
\n\t\u201cIt became a legitimate, Wall Street-funded market,\u201d she said. \u201cThe quality of the jobs began to go downhill.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tBenefits and pensions diminished, and so did tips, they say.<\/p>\n
\t\u201cIt used to be that, since a lot of these jobs are tip jobs, you could do quite well when the casinos were full. But now that we have fewer customers, tip rates have declined,\u201d Mutari said.<\/p>\n
\tAnd the industry became more reliant on part-time labor, she said. \u201cSome of the newer people we\u2019ve talked to in the casinos are working two or three part-time jobs, and they need to pool income from several jobs in order to make ends meet.\u201d<\/p>\n
\tThe workforce is being asked to do more with less, Mutari said \u2014 a phenomenon she called \u201cspeed-up.\u201d Supervisors watch more tables, and servers serve more people, she said.<\/p>\n
\tShe said Atlantic City casino jobs are, in the main, riskier than they once were, something underscored by the fact that the market has lost four casinos, and may lose a fifth, in 2014 alone.<\/p>\n
\tSo when people enter the workforce here, they\u2019re gambling, she said, \u201ceven when they don\u2019t intend to.\u201d<\/p>\n
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An upcoming book by a pair of Richard Stockton College professors gives readers the deepest look yet at what it\u2019s like to work in the casino industry, the authors say. \u201cJust One More Hand: Life in the Casino Economy,\u201d set…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8236\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}