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Dealers Union Reaches Tentative Contract

She earns $5.15 an hour and lacks health insurance as a part-time worker with a schedule that often varies from week to week.

The native of England says she lost a dealer's job five years ago at the MGM Grand for failing to smile or wishing the requisite "grand day" to a departing gambler who had suffered through a losing streak.

So Place is hopeful that a tentative contract recently struck between her employer and the Transport Workers Union of America will offer job protection and benefits to vulnerable dealers.

"Instead of our jobs getting better over time I think they've deteriorated," Place said. "This is going to give us a little more respect, more job security."

New Frontier dealers are scheduled today and Wednesday to hear details of the pending contract with the Strip hotel-casino, which would be the first-ever signed by a Las Vegas casino and its dealers.

The agreement negotiated last month by organizers for the 115,000-member Transport Workers is also the first reached by the New York-based union after a year-long push that has led to at-times contentious organizing efforts at 11 Strip properties.

The New Frontier's 100 to 110 dealers can accept or reject the proposed contract in a vote to be tallied on March 15.

"It's a big move out there. It's never been done before," said Tim Grandfield, the union's international organizing director.

"I believe it was the best deal we can get and protects the dealers through tough times."

The typical dealer at the aging north Strip casino earns less than $40,000 annually in tips and wages, Grandfield noted. Taylor said that figure is closer to $30,000.

Either way, the number is decidedly less than the estimated $65,000 dealers make annually at the high-end Bellagio. Tips generate about 70 percent of a Strip dealer's annual income, according to union figures.

"It will be a model, and we'll have to see how it works," said Bill Thompson, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor who studies the casino industry. "It's a smaller property, one where the dealers aren't getting tips like their neighbors."

Grandfield declined to offer detailed information about the proposed contract and instead referred a questioner to the union's Web site.

No specific wage and benefit proposals were listed on the site, but the contract calls for:

-A three-year hourly wage agreement that could be opened for renegotiation after two years if the economy improves.

-A grievance procedure, seniority protection and the formation of a worker committee to oversee tip sharing.

-Management to document reasons for firing, eliminating the current practice of at-will firing.

-Paid time off.

New Frontier Human Resources Director Mike Nelson has been his property's key player in the negotiations.

"I'd love to talk to you," Nelson said Monday, "but until the dealers have made a decision I don't think it would be appropriate to make a comment."

Grandfield said the organizing push has been "rancorous" at several Strip properties, where managers have threatened pro-union dealers with firing.

Negotiations continue at the Tropicana and Stratosphere, Grandfield said, although two weeks ago union activists picketed outside the south Strip Tropicana, complaining that the property's management has delivered "unpalatable" proposals.

In May, executives of MGM Grand parent MGM Mirage and Caesars Palace parent Park Place Entertainment agreed to stop harassing and intimidating Transport Workers activists and sympathizers after a complaint was filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

"They threatened the people. They've had forced meetings. They lied about our organization," Grandfield said, noting that immigrant workers were threatened with deportation.

"They're complacent with the fact that they can at-will fire these people. That's not a way to go to work."

Casino industry executives have long opposed the unionization of dealers, fearing that such a move would add an additional layer of bureaucracy between management and money-handling dealers.

At-will firing of dealers provides a powerful stick for managers seeking to penalize dealers who irritate high rollers or floor bosses, and executives fear that unionization will cut into the juice of managers whose power is measured in the ability to hire, fire and reassign.

"It's going to mean a hit to the system," UNLV's Thompson said of dealer unionization.

Yet it is unclear whether a majority of the city's estimated 30,000 dealers want to be unionized. While some might believe they have been penalized by the current system, others have thrived.

Such uncertainty has also kept the city's dominant union, the 50,000-member Culinary Local 226, from attempting to organize dealers, leaving Culinary bosses to say they must focus their attention on cocktail waitresses, food servers, change clerks, maids and others.

The New Frontier's Place first worked at the Strip property from 1990-93 but left to open the MGM Grand, where she eventually lost her job.

After a three-year stint dealing casino games in her native country, Place returned to the New Frontier in 2000, which was purchased two years earlier by Kansas businessman Phil Ruffin.

The sale ended an ugly six-year strike for better wages and benefits coordinated by Culinary Local 226 against then-owner Margaret Elardi.

As she speaks of the union's tentative agreement, Place, who served as one of two dealer representatives in the New Frontier talks, offers an upbeat tone, although she is not certain whether the deal will be approved by her colleagues.

"I work with a very mixed bag of people," she said. "Hopefully, it will be the beginning of a new phase in Vegas."

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