The life of a Las Vegas casino worker has never been easy. It’s a job that involves tough hours, drunken customers who think they’re in a no-rules adult Disneyland, and the pay is so-so. But casino work always offered a relatively steady paycheck, until now. Casino workers across the planet have been getting furloughed and laid off in record numbers due to the COVID-19 meltdown.
While no casino operator has relished cutting staff and sending them off into an economic wasteland, few have treated them as poorly as the executives at the Rampart Casino in Rampart, Nevada. Earlier this week, an as-yet-unknown number of Rampart’s employees got the news that they’d lost their jobs via a pre-recorded message from Rampart Casino Vice President and General Manager Michelle Bacigalupi.
The heartless voicemail got right to the point saying, “We’ve made the very difficult decision to terminate your employment. We’ve tried to retain our entire team. However, with the continued uncertainties, we are no longer able to do so.”
An unidentified Rampart Casino chided the casino’s cold move in an interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal saying, “We don’t have 80,000 employees…This is a smaller, intimate property (The voicemail) was disappointing but not surprising.”
While the COVID-19 lockdown makes inviting employees in for a face-to-face talk and exit interview impossible, it wouldn’t have harmed the heartless casino operator to at least afford its employees the dignity of a human call. After all, what else does its human resources department have to do these days?