Letter: Workers suffer, casinos profit

Friday, Oct. 19, 2001 | 4:19 a.m.

After reading the Sun's Oct. 14 story, "Recovery under way," my reaction to the casino industry is this: Can you cry wolf!? Really, folks. It's been exactly five weeks since Sept. 11 -- and this qualifies as "hard times"?

Seems to me that what it does show is that the casino industry does the same thing it forces its workers to do: live paycheck to paycheck, without any cushion in case even a temporary setback occurs -- and we know that's not true for those megaresorts.

The difference is that the owners and bosses of casinos can live from check to check on someone else's money. When they panic, it's the workers who get shattered ... and the town we all live in.

Granted, Las Vegas is a one-trick pony, and those of us who have watched it for a quarter-century or more have always dreaded the time when there was a serious hiccup in the travel industry. Well, we saw the hiccup, and the articles in Sunday's paper go a long way toward proving that a hiccup was all it was! Only 35 days later, the casinos are well on their way to raking in tons of other people's money again.

It's a damn shame that 15,000 laid-off employees don't have other people's money to survive, and that the same casinos who could (with great PR fanfare) "contribute" millions to New York relief efforts couldn't find a dime -- or some concern -- for all those Las Vegans.

JACK CANNON