CASINO WORKERS SEEING DREAMS FADE

America, a journey that has taken us to nearly a dozen states, talking to people who are wrestling with the seismic shifts of 2020.

A single line in a newspaper article brought us here: More than half the members of Las Vegas’ powerful Culinary Workers Union were still unemployed more than eight months into the pandemic. Most of its members are ethnic minorities or immigrants.

For decades, the working-class neighborhoods that circle Las Vegas called out to foreigners. Beckoned by an ever-growing city with a seemingly endless appetite for workers, they camefromethiopia andindia and the Philippines and dozens of other countries. But they mostly came from Latin America, especially Mexico. Theychangedlasvegas,andnevada. One in five of the state’s residents is an immigrant, according to the American Immigration Council, and one in six is a native-born citizen with at least one immigrant parent.

Now those working-class immigrant neighborhoods, where languages spill over one another in countless dirt yards, are home to armies of unemployed housekeepers and cocktail waitresses and small-business owners.

There’s the Filipino hairdresser let go by his salon and desperate for money to get his diabetes medicine, and the Cambodian who had to shut down his little restaurant. There’s the Honduran housekeeper running out of money.

There’s Olimka Luna, who came from a small Mexican city and spent 20 years in a Las Vegas casino, first as a dishwasher and then as a cook, before being laid offinmarch and fired in May. Today, her focus is purely on her house, and the $1,300 monthly mortgage payment.

“We are not going to lose our house,” she says. Then she repeats herself: “We are strong andwearenotgoingtoloseit.” Andthere’s Normaflores.

Flores, 54, hasn’t worked since March, when Nevada’s casinos were ordered closed as the pandemic spread. While many casinos reopened in June, Fiesta did not. She gets $322 a week in unemployment after taxes, but she is helping support a son, a daughter and six grandchildren who moved in with her as the state’s economycollapsed.

Her life has become an ongoing battle with the mathematics of personal finance for the impoverished. Is there enough money for the $831 rent? How late will the landlord allow her to be? How much food is left in the refrigerator? Can she afford some sort of treat for the kids?

She calculates to the dollar how much money she has left until the next check arrives.

Butsometimes, her heart makesthatcalculation.

On a chilly autumn afternoon, as Flores stood at a supermarket cash register, the cashier asked if she wanted to donate to a foodbankrunoutofanearbychurch. “Nottoday,” Flores said.

Shereached into her big red purse, pulled a handful of notes, and carefully counted out $17 for her groceries. Then she looked at what she had left — and handed the cashier $1 for the food bank.

It’s a kind of payback — she often gets help fromthatcharity.

“I’m going to help them, because other people needthemtoo,” she said.

Las Vegas sells itself on fantasies — of wealth, luxury and sex — and even the most cynical first-time visitor can come here expecting at least a hint of James Bond playing baccarat in Monte Carlo. That would be a mistake.

Today, Las Vegas feels more like a mixture of endless mall and Disney-ish resort set to the music of amplified slot machines. Gamblers wear jeans and shorts, not tuxedoes.

“Loosest slots in Vegas!” says a sign on one casino window. “20 percent off for locals,” says a billboard for a marijuana dispensary. “Free vibe with every purchase!” says another billboard, for a sex shop.

But this less-than-glamorous world has lifted tens of thousands of people into the middle class, particularly those who managed to get a union job.

The average member of the Culinary Union earns $25 an hour when benefits are included.

For a time, that middle-class life was nearly in Flores’ grasp.

Thirty years ago, she left factory work in a small Mexican city to follow her then-husband to the U.S. She found a job in the Henderson casino, first working as a server in a cafe and later in a buffet restaurant. Eventually, they had six children.

But then her marriage unraveled. “I found out a lot of bad things,” she says, and leaves it at that. They split up 13 years ago.

She bought a house, though that didn’t last long. After being shifted to a job where she no longer got tips, she couldn’t afford the mortgage.

She can still tell you the exact monthly amount: $1,935.

Seven years ago, she moved into a one-story rental made of concrete blocks and covered with peeling white paint.

In March, as the pandemic spread, she was laid off. Then, in May, she was fired along with many of her co-workers. Most of her children, working in casinos across the area, also lost their jobs.

The house looks like a bunker. The blinds are nearly always drawn. The sound of traffic is unrelenting. Theclothes washer is outside, covered by an overhang just off the side door, and shelves are piled with the children’s clothes.

She doesn’t let the kids wander far so they play in the dirt backyard, which is partially fenced in with old bed springs.

Fiesta, where she long worked as a waitress, is a mid-market complex that advertises itself as being “the best value for your gaming dollar.” It is just a couple minutes downthe street.

But that doesn’t matter anymore.

“I feel so much pain to have lost my job, to not be able to pay my bills like I used to,” she said. “I feel powerless.”

Quietly, she began to cry: “We don’t want to depend on unemployment. We want to be called back to work.”

The economy has gotten better in Las Vegas since the springtime shutdowns. Casinos were allowed to reopen in June, though some remain shut because of the lack of business. Visitors to the city reached nearly 1.9 million in October, far higher than in April but still down 49% from a year earlier.

Unemployment in the Las Vegas region stood at 14.8% in September, the highest in the nation for large metropolitan areas and nearly twice the national average.

Still, to a newcomer there seems to be plenty of people at the casinos, even if the occasional fishnet-stocking-clad dealer is doing nothing more than staring into the distance. And there are always people walking along the Strip.

But to the initiated, the city is deathly quiet.

Las Vegas thrives on crowds, with people jammed shoulder-to-shoulder from the sidewalks to casinos to restaurants. Before COVID, eating at one of the city’s best-known buffets, the 600-seat Bacchanal at Caesars Palace, could easily mean waiting an hour or more.

These days, the Bacchanal is closed and across the city, hotel rooms that normally go for $300 a night can now be had for about $90.

Those discounted rooms are a bad sign for people like Flores. There aren’t enough gamblers to get them back to work. And though she has no great love of the tourists — “I don’t think they know how hard we work” — she yearns for their return.

“If they don’t come to play,” she says, “we don’t have money.”