Excerpt
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Casinos in the U.S. rack up billions of dollars in profits each year. But as they pop up in more states and expand in places like New England, classic gambling spots suffer, case in point, Atlantic City.
Our economics correspondent Paul Solman has the story, part of his ongoing reporting Making Sense of financial news.
MAN: I got laid off at Showboat August 31 — 28 years.
MAN: We’re actually fighting for our lives out here.
PAUL SOLMAN (NewsHour): Workers in Atlantic City, New Jersey, protesting a threatened slash in pay and benefits at the latest casino under siege here, the Trump Taj Mahal.
What will you do if the Taj closes down?
WOMAN: I don’t know. I don’t have an idea, because no jobs. So, what do I do?
PAUL SOLMAN: Four casinos closed already this year, thousands unemployed, and now the Taj, unless its 3,000 or so workers and the city make concessions.
Hotel union president Bob McDevitt.
C. ROBERT MCDEVITT, President, UNITE-HERE Local54: The average wage is about $12 an hour. What makes these middle-class jobs is the health care and the — and the retirement plan. And that’s part of the original legislation that brought gambling to Atlantic City.
PAUL SOLMAN: It was an economic strategy forged to restore the city to its heydays, says Mayor Don Guardian.
MAYOR DON GUARDIAN, Atlantic City: Atlantic city’s been around for 160 years, it’s been a destination.
PAUL SOLMAN: First as a health spa, with rolling chairs to ferry the feeble.
DON GUARDIAN: Then we built beautiful Victorian hotels to attract the rich people from Philadelphia and New York, and that worked for about 40 years.
PAUL SOLMAN: Into the 20th century, that is.
DON GUARDIAN: Then we decided to ignore prohibition. That was very successful.
PAUL SOLMAN: So successful that when the game of “Monopoly” was popularized in the 1930s, its board was laid out as Atlantic City.
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