Indiana Casino Dealers Are Bringing Back the Recognition Strike

There are no clocks in a casino, so the dealers all set their phone alarms for noon. Everyone was a bundle of nerves. Before work, a couple of people threw up.

But when the cacophony of alarms sounded, everyone lifted their hands in the air, slammed down the lids on their games of baccarat, blackjack, craps, and roulette, and announced they were on strike. “It was more powerful than anything I’ve ever felt in my life,” said dealer Tera Arnold. “I had goosebumps head to toe.”

The other dealers were waiting outside. When the strikers began streaming out the doors and moving their cars out of the employee parking lot, “the sheer amount of joy, raw energy, seeing my colleagues from all walks of life pull around that corner, hands out the windows—everybody lost their mind,” said dealer Dakota Massman. “It was one of the most beautiful moments of human solidarity I’ve ever had the pleasure of being part of.”

As of October 17, the dealers at the Horseshoe Indianapolis Casino in Shelbyville, Indiana, were on strike for union recognition.

THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY

It's a rare, courageous, throwback tactic. Ninety years ago this was the main way unions were formed.

But ever since the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, another option has become the norm: If the employer doesn’t acknowledge your majority support on union cards, you file for a government-supervised election to prove your majority a second time. You grit your teeth through weeks of anti-union pressure, win the vote, and the government orders your boss to get with the program.

That's how the 200 dealers at the Horseshoe Casino, part of the Caesars chain, had planned to do it. They marched on their boss in September with proof of super-majority support to join Teamsters Local 135. They got an election date, October 17. Caesars brought in the union-busting firm Littler Mendelson, but the dealers stuck together—in fact, the propaganda blitz backfired and more workers signed cards.

Then on October 1, the federal government shut down. The election was postponed indefinitely.

The union proposed to bring in a neutral party to conduct the vote; the boss wasn’t interested. So Local 135 leaders talked with the casino workers about their options. They could wait in limbo while the company honed its anti-union talking points and diluted the unit with new hires. Or they could take a big risk and do it the old-fashioned way. The workers voted by 92 percent to go for it.

“Everybody keeps asking if we’re scared of losing our jobs,” Arnold said. “I’ve never been so not scared of anything in my life. I feel so powerful, so strong. We’re finally united.”

“Everybody is out here yelling, screaming, stopping traffic,” Massman said. “We’ve been quiet in there for years because we were afraid we were going to lose our jobs. They can fire you for anything. They can cook up something about a hundred-dollar variance and they don’t have to prove it. Out here I don’t have that fear anymore.”

ABYSMAL WAGES

A top complaint is the abysmal pay. Dealer wages are $5-$7 an hour. The rest of their earnings are tips, pooled and divided based on hours each day.

The wage is so low that management has an incentive to over-staff even during slow times. If opening a dozen more tables for an hour causes one customer to lose an extra $100, the casino makes a profit—but the tips are thinner, spread among more dealers.

“We went from 120 dealers to 200 dealers,” Massman said. “Essentially they over-saturated our workforce. Paychecks are down almost $1,000 a month. That’s rent. That’s your car bill.”

Making matters worse: Workers taking paid time off on a given day are counted in the tip pool—so your co-workers pay for your PTO. And “dual rate” dealers like Arnold work some days as floor leads for $23-$25 an hour but no tips, which depending on your schedule can mean you get the worst of both worlds.

Then there are the working conditions. Arnold first started thinking about organizing on a day when the gas leaked, a water pipe burst, the casino flooded, the heat went off, the temperature fell to 37 degrees, and yet dealers were required to keep working—wearing hats and gloves, sloshing through flood water. It was Christmas morning, 2022.

“Other departments represented by unions were able to leave,” she said. “They told us that if we left we would get job abandonment and insubordination.”

Meanwhile Horseshoe is raking in a million dollars a day, Massman said. “It’s public information, you can verify every number. They really are printing money.”

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A large majority of dealers and dual-rates are on strike, covering all three entrances, picketing round the clock on their regular work shifts. After three weeks, only a few have gone back in—and some who weren’t striking at first have walked out. They’ve handed out thousands of leaflets.

Strike pay helps make this possible. The dealers are getting the enhanced rate of $1,000 a week, which the Teamsters international has been granting to strikers “all over the country for the last year,” Local 135 President Dustin Roach said. “That’s why we’ve been taking on so many fights, and winning so many fights.”

The Teamsters constitution sets strike pay much lower—five times monthly dues for members, and $150 for newly organizing workers—but it also allows the international executive board to approve any strike benefits it considers in the union’s best interests. Roach said the executive board has been approving every request for the enhanced pay, and encouraging locals to publicize it to strengthen their strike threats.

The casino is still operating, but the strike has turned many customers away. Some are sympathetic—dealers get to know their regulars pretty well—including a couple of players for the Indianapolis Colts. A retired postal union member burned his Diamond Elite Caesars club card before a cheering crowd.

Conditions inside are miserable. Teamsters at Sysco, Pepsi, Kroger, UPS, and Quickway are refusing to cross the picket line. “A business can’t run without truckers,” Arnold said. “They need food and alcohol, and they’re not getting it.” The vending machines are empty; cards and dice aren’t being delivered; the elevator goes unrepaired. The casino rented a box truck to make its own pickups, but the truck isn’t refrigerated, so food is going bad.

THE RIGHT TO HONOR PICKET LINES

On the other hand, all the members of existing unions at the casino are crossing the picket line—even the slot machine attendants, who are in the same union, Teamsters Local 135. Their contracts lack picket line protection language. “They’re so sad,” Arnold says. “They hate crossing that line. Every time they drive by they’re honking and waving.”

Once a manager brought hand warmers out to her striking husband. “She walked back in and they fired her,” Arnold said.

For the strikers, the experience has driven home the importance of winning the right to honor picket lines in their future contract.

“If you get a couple units in cahoots, you could shut this whole place down,” Massman said. “Whenever contracts are up for other departments, you can bet your bottom dollar we’re going to go out so that they can get paid more, whether it’s jockeys, environmental services, cashiers.”

CAESARS BLEEDS MONEY

The dealers are the largest unit in the casino, and not easy to replace. Dealers need weeks of training in each game, plus licensing and a background check. “They don’t have the bodies in there to keep it going,” Arnold said.

The casino has brought workers over from the poker department, plus managers from the Caesars casino in Anderson, Indiana. Arnold and Massman drove up to talk with the dealers there. They found out what scabs are getting paid: $45 an hour, plus a $50 gas card every trip.

But management must realize that bargaining won’t be cheap with these workers who have learned not to fear a strike.

Arnold, who has lived in Shelbyville for 15 years, was part of a community fight to keep the casino from opening in the first place. “The majority didn’t want the poverty, the corruption to the community,” she said. “We all fought against it.”

Eventually she, her son, and her daughter all ended up as casino workers. “What’s eating me alive is we fought so hard to not have this happen to our community,” she said. “This is what we were scared was going to happen. Open your eyes, Shelby County, it’s happening.”

‘NEVER BEEN MORE PROUD’

The Horseshoe Casino is Shelbyville’s biggest private employer, accustomed to throwing money around and getting its way. It claims a section of Michigan Road, a major local thoroughfare, is its private property. The union disputes this. But in the third week, the city sent cops out to tear down the union canopies, smash up supplies, and threaten everyone with arrest.

The strikers trooped across to the definitely-public side of Michigan Road while Local 135 President Dustin Roach—who won leadership of the 14,000-member local three years ago on a reform slate—risked arrest, picketing solo for hours on the disputed sidewalk. They never did arrest him, and 120 strikers packed a city council meeting that night.

Spirits are high. “I’ve never been more proud of myself and the people around me,” Massman said. “This is how the working class needs to come together. It feels really good to fight for others. It’s something I want to look more into with my life.”