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Steve Wynn's reach into dealers' pockets isn't new ... egregious, yes, but not new
When I broke into the gaming business in 1977, at Little Caesar’s, a place appropriately named after a gangster in a movie, I worked for Jim Oberly, who’d been convicted of armed robbery for ripping off a market at the corner of Flamingo and Paradise Roads, sometime in 1968. He was hardly a professional. He was a sad drunk who swung with a whiskey bottle as part of the loot and promptly uncapped it and guzzled it down. Deputies responding to the robbery alarm found him passed out in his car.
I appreciated Jim even if he was an inept bandit. You see, stealing and gaming were all the same to him. He’d broken into the business when the casinos were flat, when owners used deuce dealers to recover on the sly whatever a stiff was lucky enough to win on the square.
In a casino money is the raw measurement of a person’s worth and power, from customer to the highest level of bosses. And the rule in the casino business is that money floats to the top. I discovered this theorem early on. No one at Little Caesars resented us making the paltry sums we pocketed. At The Mint, a downtown joint now part of the Horseshoe, I tripled my income and was finally again able to eat three meals a day, but I worked for managers who resented whatever tips I made ($30.00 a day). New Year’s of 1978, I was dealing a twelve-hour shift, and like the other dealers, making regular visits to the toke box. Sonny Williams, the shift boss, ambushed me by the toke box, and said, as I dropped my tokes, “Stealin’ from the bosses, huh?” And he probably believed it was taken from him.
In 1984 I was fired with some twenty other dealers from the Maxim two weeks before Christmas. Our transgression: earning three-weeks paid vacation and about $30 a day in wages. We were replaced in two weeks by dealers who earned starting wages and who would not see a vacation for twelve months. That year the Maxim bosses shared in a significant bonus pool. Those of us who were fired contacted an attorney, but laws and courts being what they were/are, nothing came of it because had we filed a lawsuit, we likely would have been blackballed from the industry.
I cite this history because corporations that now operate casinos insist all of that injustice is history, that employees now are respected. To show how deep respect goes for employees, this past month Steve Wynn instituted a policy that requires dealers to surrender a percentage of their tips to bosses who supervise them.
Because it occurred at Wynn’s and not some neighborhood casino, the announcement of the “new” policy made headlines. It’s an unconscionable siphoning of their income, but it’s not new. Years ago at the Barbary Coast when tips were cut up, dealers had to stuff toke envelopes for the bosses. Bob Stupak invoked a similar policy at Vegas World, and perhaps other casinos I’m not familiar with did the same.
What other business asks line employees to pay the salaries of supervisors? Not American auto companies who are in financial straits. Not the airline industry that’s suffering its own doldrums. No, the casino business, an industry that has enjoyed record breaking profits year to year for most the past three decades, stands alone in this, specifically Steve Wynn, whose vast fortune is hardly at risk.
In part, the argument advanced in defense of the policy is that the house mints and regulates use of its chips and reserves the right to establish policy regarding how they are cashed and who should benefit and how much. This includes tips.
All casinos have a reasonable right to establish advance policies about tipping. However, management taking control of tips ex post facto is (and there’s no other term for it) stealing a man’s bread. Once the player has bet for the dealers and won, or handed over a tip without betting it, that money belongs to the dealer (or dealers, because tips are pooled).
The system of pooling is not entirely fair. Some dealers interact well with customers, and my experience was that about twenty percent of us brought about seventy percent of the tips to the pool. On the other hand, to earn those tips, all of us endured, in roughly equal proportions, insults from customers, undue pressure from pit bosses, sore feet, aching backs, and fatigued shoulders, and without exception we put our health at risk inhaling obscene amounts of secondhand cigarette smoke.
I’ve read commentaries from several pundits, but none addressed the ethical question Wynn’s policy raises: When is a person’s money his or hers, and who besides him or her has a right to it? Imagine a different scenario. I’m a college professor. My wage is set. What I earn is mine, and I’m required, by contract, to perform specific functions for that remuneration. I’m directly but loosely supervised by a department chair. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that I’m at the top of the teaching scale, say $90,000, and the president of my college wishes to eliminate what he thinks is a gross disparity between me and my supervisor who earns $78,000 annually. Is he right to take $8,000 from me, bringing my earnings to $82,000 and add that to my supervisor’s income? Is it fairer or any more ethical if he reduces my income by only $6000, which would give me and my supervisor equal incomes? Is it even legal?
We hear a figure of $100,000 and whistle. Who’s entitled to earn that much for turning over cards? Some might argue the dealers are overpaid, and ten or fifteen percent off their cut won’t hurt that much, but that’s a strawman argument. Whether $10,000 or $100,000, it’s theirs. They earned it doing what they do, just as Wynn earned his hundreds of millions doing what he does. Dispense with the propaganda the industry spreads about improving working conditions for dealers and the old rub remains true: “You don’t like it, quit; otherwise, dummy up and deal.”
Where would it end, this splitting of the tips? Perhaps the secretaries and the telephone operators should be cut in. Toss in the casino porters. And why stop at taking tip income? Why not take property purchased with tip money. Steve Wynn might want to consider taking plasma televisions from his dealers’ houses and hand them over to any pit bosses who lack one. Certainly it seems only fair that if a dealer has something his or her supervisor lacks, the boss is equally entitled to it.
By requiring dealers to surrender a portion of tips to management, is Wynn effectively making dealers pay to be employed, just as topless dancers pay cabarets for the privilege to work? A lap dancer may earn a thousand or more a day in tips, of which she pays $100 to the house. It seems Wynn asks roughly the same of his dealers. Cabarets get by with it because dancers are independent contractors. On the flip side of the coin, union bosses who demand kickbacks from workers for finding them a job can be charged with extortion for taking part of that person’s pay. I wonder if Steve Wynn’s policy fits in a fuzzy middle ground.
Perhaps dealers struck their bargain with the devil decades ago when they surrendered their right to unionize. It would be interesting to see this matter end up in the courts and have a jurist address the question of when something does become a person’s property, but the law will not intercede on its own, and without a complainant the matter will never be adjudicated.
Given the history of dealers and their labor disputes, I imagine they will whine but ultimately go along. Still, I would argue that if money (or anything of convertible value) is given by one human to another and transferred without condition, a third party has no say so in the matter, be it Steve Wynn or some higher authority, which if I’m not mistaken, in the State of Nevada, is only God.
Lee Barnes is the author of Dummy Up and Deal: Inside the Culture of Casino Dealing and a former dealer who thinks Steve Wynn is taxing his dealers to pay for casino expansion.
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