(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Detroit casino workers go on strike [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-18 The house always wins. It would only be fair that the dealers and other personnel in a casino be paid accordingly. That hasn’t been the case at any of Detroit’s three casinos, and so the workers went on strike yesterday. JC Reindl for the Detroit Free Press: Thousands of Detroit casino workers went on strike Tuesday after negotiations between the three casinos and unions representing the workers failed to reach a new labor agreement by a noon deadline. The strike is the first at the Detroit casinos — MGM Grand, MotorCity and Hollywood Casino at Greektown — since they opened in the late 1990s and 2000. The Detroit Casino Council, which represents 3,700 casino workers across five unions, has been seeking better wages and benefits in negotiations with the casinos that started in early September. The council and unions have shared few details about their specific wage requests, citing the wide variety of job types in casinos and the attached hotels, other than to say workers need big raises to keep up with inflation. But listen, JC Reindl, do think about one specific job in the casino: blackjack dealer. If a customer gets a “natural blackjack” (an ace and a royal card or a ten), the payout is 3 to 2. So on a $100 bet, the dealer would pay out $150 along with the player’s $100 wager. I did the math correctly, right? Oh, but I forgot that now a lot of casinos are being stingy with the blackjack payouts, reducing the natural blackjack payout to 6 to 5. That means that on a $100 bet, the dealer would pay out only $120 to the player’s $100 wager. Check my math, please. Most people who play blackjack infrequently will never get a natural blackjack. With my Java blackjack program (work in progress on GitHub), I had to lose thousands of dollars in play money to get a real play quote to demonstrate natural blackjack in my program: C:\Users\AL\Documents\NetBeansProjects\BlackJack\build>java -cp classes blackjack.BlackJack BLACKJACK Enter your wager in whole dollars: $50 Your first card is King of Clubs Dealer's face-up card is Three of Clubs Your second card is Ace of Hearts Your hand's value is 21 Dealer's face-down card is ????? Congratulations, you have a natural blackjack *** YOU WIN $75 **** Obviously in that example the dealer didn’t have blackjack and would have been required to take at least one more card. My program, as it stands now, will pay a player for natural blackjack as long as the dealer does not also have a natural blackjack. I had plenty of choices for real play quotes involving the player losing after either going bust or standing on a lower score than the dealer. I didn’t have to play long for those outcomes. The point is, most people lose. The minimum bet at the blackjack table is usually $25. Suppose there are five players at the table for a given hand who all make that minimum bet. One of them gets a 6-7-8 blackjack (suits don’t matter for regular blackjack) winning a 1 to 1 payout, the other four either go bust or stand on a lower score than the dealer. Net, the house just won $75 for something that took way less than an hour. And how much do the blackjack dealers get paid? On average in Detroit, $13.03 an hour, behind dealers in Lansing who get paid an enviable additional… 28¢. According to ZipRecruiter, As of Oct 10, 2023, the average hourly pay for a Blackjack Dealer in Michigan is $11.09 an hour. While ZipRecruiter is seeing salaries as high as $21.83 and as low as $6.11, the majority of Blackjack Dealer salaries currently range between $7.84 (25th percentile) to $15.72 (75th percentile) in Michigan. The average pay range for a Blackjack Dealer varies greatly (as much as $7.88), which suggests there may be many opportunities for advancement and increased pay based on skill level, location and years of experience. [...] Michigan ranks number 41 out of 50 states nationwide for Blackjack Dealer salaries. On top of not paying dealers very well, the casinos also want to contribute less money to employees’ health care. Back to JC Reindl’s article: "The company, in my opinion, is not coming back with anything that is even close to fair," said Johanna Lams, who works as a table games dealer at MGM Grand Detroit and is also a local UAW chairperson. “When you start talking about inflation and start talking about pay rate, you’ve got to at least be close, and we're not right now. "She added, “You’ve got people here working at MGM who don’t even make enough to have apartments. They are sleeping in their cars.” That’s messed up. The casinos need to do better by their employees. I’ve been wondering if I can play Spanish 21 at any of the Detroit casinos. For me, it’s a hypothetical question, since I hardly ever go to a casino, even if no one’s on strike. I’m a flambeur only with play money. If you have a gambling problem, call 1 (800) 270-7117 or go to https://www.dontregretthebet.org/ from the Michigan Gaming Control Board. The national hotline number is 1 (800) 522-4700. 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